Working with the Portable Document Format (PDF)

You have no doubt seen and worked with Adobe Acrobat documents in the Portable Document Format. Software manuals, government documents, and electronic books of all kinds have been published and distributed on the Web for years. The idea behind PDF is simple: create and distribute electronic documents in a manner that the layout of the page is controlled (that is, every reader sees it the same way), and with no barriers to reading it (a free Reader exists for every system).

Adobe Systems, the owners of the Acrobat software and inventors of the PDF format, has been inconsistent in its Linux support over the years. The Reader supplied with SUSE Linux and other Linux distributions is version 5.0. There has never been a Linux version of the full Acrobat product, either. Ghostscript has become the default Linux PDF reader over time, but its interface is a bit more clunky than Adobe's own product.

Note

Adobe has delivered a Linux version of Adobe Reader 7.0. This is retrievable in YaST or from the Adobe site directly: http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html

Considering that PDF is a slight variation on the UNIX/Linux PostScript print standard, it's a little surprising that free, open source PDF creation tools have not been forthcoming. The exceptions are the TeX publishing tool and a pstopdf shell utility that did not produce a quality transformation from plain PostScript (ps) to PDF. You can indeed make PDF files with TeX, but it is notoriously difficult to learn and operate.

This changed with OpenOffice.org v1.1. Finally, there was an easy-to-use method of creating good-looking PDF documents in Linux. All you need to do to create a PDF is click the PDF Export tool on your default toolbar.

Suppose you have a holiday letter with graphics that you send out to friends and family every year. You can easily create a PDF version right in OpenOffice.org that you can send to your email buddies or put on your personal website:

1.	Create your document as you would normally.
2.	Insert graphics and watermarks and position them where you want.
3.	Save the document as an OpenOffice.org document first so that you have an "original" copy that you can edit.
4.	When everything's ready to go, click the Acrobat toolbar button (or go to File, Export as PDF).
5.	A dialog box will come up. If you want to give the PDF file a distinct name, that's OK. OOo will automatically add the .pdf extension to your file.
6.	A PDF Options screen will appear, allowing you to choose how many pages of your document to include in your PDF, how to handle graphics, and a couple of other options. If you have a long document with headings, you may want to check the Tagged PDF box. Your headings will then appear as Bookmarks in the PDF, making for easier navigation. When you've made your choices, click Export to create the PDF.
7.	Your OOo file will still be onscreen so that you can edit it. To open your new PDF document, locate it in your favorite file manager. Acrobat Reader (or Ghostview, depending on how your system is configured) will display your exported file.

Figure 7.10 shows a PDF created with OpenOffice.org in Acrobat Reader.

Figure 7.10. Create your own PDF documents with OpenOffice.org.

Tip

Learn more about the things you can do with OpenOffice.org and other Linux office suites in Chapter 9, "Being Productive: Office Suites and Other Tools."