Collaboration in the Enterprise from the perspective of Anthony Holmes, an IBM Accelerated Value Program Leader (Premium Support Program).

Working Collaboration Blog

Hybrid PDF Documents

Anthony Holmes  3 January 2010 06:44:41 PM
I have discovered a neat Open Office.org extension that combines the benefits of PDFs (near universal readability) with the benefits of Open Document Format (a clean, standards based document format, not subject to a monopoly provider's control).

When I send documents to my customers, I will have authored them in Open Document Format using either Lotus Symphony or OpenOffice.org. Rather than convert the document to MS Office format, I will likely convert it to PDF format for sending. I can feel confident that anybody will be able to read that format. If I think that the customer may want to edit or re-use the document, I might send them a second copy: in Open Document Format... because most (but not all) of the people I deal with will have access to Symphony via Notes 8, Open Office or one of more than twenty programs that support the format. But it always looks awkward to send them two attachments for the same document.

The Sun PDF Import Extension is a plug-in for Open Office 3 that has some neat features.

The feature that I like is the ability to create Hybrid PDF documents when you export a document as a PDF from Open Office. The PDF you create looks like a standard PDF (and displays like one in Acrobat). But it also contains the entire Open Document formatting. This means you can open it an edit it in Open Office just like any other document.

As its title suggests, the Extension was initially aimed at letting you import a PDF into Open Office. If you import an ordinary PDF there are limits. Principally, each line of a document's text appears as a separate text block. If you imported a 'run of the mill' PDF, you could make changes to it, but it's not like opening a Word Processing/Spreadsheet/Presentation document. It's fiddly. And that's all because of the complexity of the standard PDF format: it's not designed to be an "Office" editing format.

But Hybrid PDF documents give you a very neat way of getting the best of both worlds: a universal display format (PDF) and a fully flexible editing format (ODF).

There's one (hopefully temporary) limitation: Because the extension is based around Open Office 3, hybrid PDFs don't appear to be editable by the current version of Symphony. I'll be very interested to see whether Symphony can open Hybrid PDFs when it is updated later this year.

Examples

Here are some sample documents. They are all a simple one page document that I wrote describing Hybrid PDFs, saved in four different file formats. I've included some simple graphics, styles, a table, some bullet points and a hyperlink in the document so that you can compare how this document looks in different formats.

(They were all created on a Macintosh.)

Hybrid PDF Format (115k)
Standard PDF Format (70k)
MS Office 95/2000 Format (53k)
Open Document Format (45k)