Even in some of its earliest incarnations, the basis of the appeal of OpenOffice.org was the ability to convert files from any of their programs into space-saving PDFs that could be viewed by anyone with Adobe Acrobat. While this function remains today, it has been, of course, been duplicated by Microsoft, who made the PDF conversion possible in their Office 2007 suite.
However, one thing they haven’t been able to duplicate is the ability to edit PDFs, which OpenOffice, with the help of one handy extension, can do.
Created by Sun Microsystems, the PDF Import Extension, which is now available in its full, non-beta edition, allows anyone who has OOo installed to import and edit PDF files and save them back in that format.
While those users who have Windows will find this extension a viable alternative to the more-expensive Adobe Acrobat, Linux users, who don’t have Adobe products available to them at all in a non-Wine environment, this should be considered a godsend.
How does it work? After downloading the extension, users can open OpenOffice Draw and simply open the PDF they wish to edit. This is especially useful for simple changes and additions to text, which will maintain the text attributes inherent in the PDF.
A word of warning, however. The extension has been known to have problems importing PDFs created by professional desktop publishing programs that utilize special fonts or complex vector graphics. Also, be careful with PDFs that are more than 20 pages, as it may cause some performance and stability issues.
Other than that, give the Sun PDF Import Extension a try. As with countless other extensions, it’s free and ready to download from the OpenOffice.org Web site. You won’t be sorry!
