Microsoft adds PDF support to Office

Microsoft has announced that it will be supporting PDF files in the next version of its Office software suite. Being able to save Office documents as PDFs was a feature that more than 120,000 users have requested every month, said Steven Sinofsky, Microsoft's senior vice president of Office product development. Office 12 will have a 'Save as PDF' function to create a PDF and electronically distribute a read-only version of the document.

As such, PDF documents created in Office 12 can contain live hyperlinks and be read by screen readers. PDFs created in the Publisher component of Office will also have support for CMYK colour models and printing page marks.

Note that Office 12 PDFs will not support the security technologies of Adobe's Acrobat PDF creation software such as DRM and password protection. Microsoft has ambitions of its own for its Windows Media DRM system, and is not about to cede territory to a major rival.