Hi all!
I am considering making the crossover to running for the most part on open source software.
Before that, I’d like to give OpenOffice.org a go and I have been wondering about one thing:
Writer (OO.o’s word processor) can export to PDF. But to which degree? Does it allow hyperlinks, bookkmarks, encryption…?
I have not found a list of the ODT2PDF features and limitations, so I wondered what your experiences are.
Cheers,
Peter
Scribus is a probably a better option if you want full control of making PDFs.
PS. hyperlinks work, donno about bookmarks and you could probably find a separate program to encryption your PDFs.
I can’t answer about encryption, but hyperlinks and bookmarks are fully supported. And the quality of the PDFs are excellent. If you need more power, there’s ExtendedPDF. It’s a macro right now, but it’s going to be a stand alone program soon.
I don’t care to touch this mess but LaTeX can do just about everything and then some, upper academia is starting to switch to it in places (seems like I keep bumping into it when meeting statiticians(didn’t come close to spelling that correctly)).
Hyperlinks yes, bookmarks don’t know, encryption in the last release 2.0.4.
You can export some controls, like listboxes, editboxes, …
I can second that.
In case with bookmarks you mean “notes” (I use a localized version which has different keywords for that), they’re exported to PDF, too. You just have to enable the “export notes” option in the PDF dialogue.
(Version 2.04)
A good way to test OpenOffice and/or new versions is to use the Portable-OpenOffice. It’s a ZIP archive you just have to download and unpack, then you can start the application(s) by simple double clicking them from any medium with no installation.
Oh well, and and don’t forget the nice trick to use Openoffice to make Blender import DXF files via SGV (in another way compared to the built-in DXF import): CAD/DXF to Blender
Thanks for the responses!
I have chosen to try Scribus, but it won’t let me open any .pdf file, saying it is in an incorrect format 
Not even those created with the Ghostscript printer or Adobe Acrobat…
The bookmark feature is extremely robust. It’s all handled in the header styles. I use them all the time and they work great.
I don’t know if you’ll be able to get it to edit PDFs (it may have that ability, but seems unlikely…) You’ll likely have to convert the PDF to something else (like PS/EPS using Ghostscript) before being able to do this… Even Adobe Acrobat 6.0 Standard can’t edit PDFs, to my knowledge (and I’ve tried!) I’ve converted PDF CAD drawings to WMF (w/ GS/GSView) and imported them into AutoCAD for editing, but all the text is converted to vectors :mad: .
PDF is not supposed to be editable anyway (weren’t you looking to export to PDF?). You can load old OpenOffice.org 1.0 files with it, or do what mzungu said (try to convert to PS/EPS), and import that file into Scribus (or try and see if OOo works for you).
Oh, you want to EDIT pdf’s. That’s different. Not a lot of tools do that.
I like the OO PDF creation, it lets you choose to keep the “tag” things like hyperlinks, choose whether to compress graphics into JPEG or not.
Last I checked it didn’t let you edit them, just export it.
PDF995 gives you a free (Windows) PDF “printer” which works very good as well.
However… it apparently lets you edit PDFs too.
KOffice will open PDFs. It may completely butcher your documents, but they will open.
To be honest, I wasn’t expecting anything better than a PDF printer but those only take the graphical side of things into account (no bookmarks, hyperlinks,…) so they’re great for printing, but they are useless when they’re intended to be viewed on a pc.
I think I’m going to save for an Adoba Acrobat suite and in the meanwhile be statisfied with .doc and .odt files 
At any rate, thanks for all the responses guys!