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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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