The Wall Street Journal reported on June 2 that Adobe is poised to launch an antitrust suit in Europe against Microsoft, following the break-down of four-month-long talks over Microsoft's Office 2007 PDF plans.
Microsoft announced in October 2005 that it was building into Office 2007 a PDF export capability, following requests for such a feature by its customers. But according to the Wall Street Journal, Microsoft is now planning to remove that feature, at the request of Adobe. Adobe also sought to get Microsoft to charge for the export-to-PDF capability, but so far Microsoft is not planning to do so, according to the Journal.
Microsoft said last fall that Office 2007 would be able to output PDF documents compatible with any PDF viewer that supports version 1.4 of the public Adobe PDF specification. Office 2007 PDF documents were expected to be accessible to screen readers, the company said. Microsoft SharePoint-related products also were set to be able to index PDF documents for use in enterprise content management scenarios, Microsoft added.
View: Microsoft-Watch
Microsoft announced in October 2005 that it was building into Office 2007 a PDF export capability, following requests for such a feature by its customers. But according to the Wall Street Journal, Microsoft is now planning to remove that feature, at the request of Adobe. Adobe also sought to get Microsoft to charge for the export-to-PDF capability, but so far Microsoft is not planning to do so, according to the Journal.
Microsoft said last fall that Office 2007 would be able to output PDF documents compatible with any PDF viewer that supports version 1.4 of the public Adobe PDF specification. Office 2007 PDF documents were expected to be accessible to screen readers, the company said. Microsoft SharePoint-related products also were set to be able to index PDF documents for use in enterprise content management scenarios, Microsoft added.

Last edited by gohankid77 on 02 Jun 2006 - 16:18
There's lots of software that incorporates PDF Export capabilities. Why doesn't Adobe, that "all of a sudden" remembered it owns the patent to PDF, go after them as well?
Very sketchy...
- Adobe, http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer..._reference.html
They make it publicly available and neither the specification nor that page makes reference to any sort of requirement that the PDF technology be used in applications sold for profit (that would make it hard to sell Acrobat Professional, now wouldn't it?)
O'Kelly said he did not know whether these other companies and organizations had paid Adobe in order to include a publish-to-PDF capability in their products."
That's my thought too - why other software has the ability, but not Office. I understand that there's a revenue stream to be had adding ANY functionality to Office, but surely the ability to create PDF from the shipping product is worth saving somehow, rather than having to add it on aftermarket by purchasing the full version of Acrobat or an Office compatible PDF printer.
I almost want to call shame on Adobe here. PDF has become a de-facto standard in so many areas - the ability to create it via Office would help maintain that market share for them, and perhaps even increase it. Who needs Microsoft's XPS implementation if everyone can still use PDF?
On the note of Bloatware, why is that software like Foxit Reader, which is less than 3MB uncompressed and uses a single file can open PDFs instantly, While Adobe Reader first comes in a 500kb Download Manager, which then downloads the 20.3MB installer, which takes more than 5 minutes for a new computer or serveral hours on an older computer to initially decompress the installer ("FEAD Optimizer"
I thought OpenOffice could export things to PDF, I can't see why Office 2007 couldn't. It's like the best feature of office in the last 10 years!
Cal
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