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Convert .doc files to PDF and retain 'structure' info
Authored by: fracai on Jan 09, '09 08:00:43AM

To be fair, how much does Microsoft have to do with "Print to PDF"? Unless you're talking about exporting to PDF from within Word, this is likely more a limitation of the print system. After all, when printing you don't need to retain the document structure links.

It's been a while since I've upgraded or used Word so I may be outdated.

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i am jack's amusing sig file



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Convert .doc files to PDF and retain 'structure' info
Authored by: frgough on Jan 09, '09 08:36:17AM

Word 2008 has a "save as PDF" option, which does nothing more than simply print to PDF. Microsoft's PDF support has always stunk. On both platforms.



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Convert .doc files to PDF and retain 'structure' info
Authored by: hamarkus on Jan 09, '09 08:39:27AM

Every app that can print to a PS printer can have its output converted to PDF on all computer platforms. In OS X, this functionality is build into the print dialog, installing Acrobat provides another engine for the conversion (also available via the print dialogue).
But printing does just hand over what will appear on each page to the printing subsystem, it does not hand over any metadata about the document structure. Therefore, creating a PDF with such metadata requires the application to cooperate in providing the data. OpenOffice and Neooffice use their own PDF engine and don't use the printing system for it. As such they can incorporate these metadata.
On Windows, Adobe wrote a plugin for Word (and PP) that has access to the metadata and thus can create a PDF containing them.

For the Mac version of Word, Adobe did not bother to write that plugin (because PDF creation itself is already easy) or MS did not make it easy/feasible to add plugins.



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Convert .doc files to PDF and retain 'structure' info
Authored by: theilgaard on Jan 13, '09 10:52:36AM

It's not fully correct that Word need to speak directly with Distiller or vice versa.

The tags Distiller needs to build the document structure, can be put into the Postscript file for Distiller to process.

All old FrameMaker users know how this is done, as FrameMaker had this feature since the beginning of the pdf-format (more or less). At least it had the feature much earlier than Adobe build the plugin for Word on Windows (which btw actually exports the document to Postscript, and lets Distiller process this).



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Convert .doc files to PDF and retain 'structure' info
Authored by: palahala on Jan 09, '09 09:00:29AM

Oddly enough, when using Safari, menu File, Print and then selecting PDF, does in fact create clickable links (no, not only for links that Preview can recognize due to the http:// or www prefix, but even clickable images are retained in the resulting PDF).

So either Safari somehow overrules the PDF option in the operating system's print dialog, or printing in Mac OS X can in fact include details about the structure...



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Convert .doc files to PDF and retain 'structure' info
Authored by: Anonymous on Jan 09, '09 03:08:03PM

Pardon? So does Word. Please RTFA.



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Convert .doc files to PDF and retain 'structure' info
Authored by: palahala on Jan 10, '09 03:48:21AM

A stands for Article? Please explain a bit more on how Word does this, as I cannot find it in the original post. Apart form that, I was replying to fracai. And both fracai and hamarkus seem to indicate that no structure is transferred through the "Print to PDF" function. In my understanding no structure also implies: no clickable links, except maybe for those links that the PDF reader can discover while displaying (like human readable internet links).

So: does Word on the Mac indeed create clickable table of contents, clickable indexes, clickable references to other pages, et cetera?

If so, then maybe Word has a similar preference as OpenOffice.org's "Export bookmarks as named destinations" which I described below.

As a side note: printing to PDF uses "Mac OS X 10.5.6 Quartz PDFContext". The word "Context" might suggest it gets more info than just the printout itself -- just like I experienced in Safari, and like you might have experienced in Word?



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Convert .doc files to PDF and retain 'structure' info
Authored by: frgough on Jan 12, '09 09:20:20AM

No. Word 2008 does not include clickable cross-references in the PDFs it generates (clickable TOC and index enteries are simply Word-generated cross reference fields).



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