Can you open a PDF in Office - No!!!

Introduction

What do you mean you can not edit a PDF document in Office, this certainly used to be the case! The only way SoSLUG previously found to edit a PDF file and belive you me we looked, you first needed to import any PDF into "Inkscape" and convert, whilst you can edit the file and alter it you needed to save the file either as an "Inkscape" drawing or save back to a PDF by exporting. Whilst there is little problem with this if you needed to continually edit the file it can be a bit of a pain.

Open Office import

Open Office like many office applications have Import and Export filters and you would have thought this filter (The PDF to Office converter ) would be readily available from the Open Office site, well if it is we have not found it. Open Office can be downloaded from "http://openoffice.org" The import utility has been tested under Linux Ubuntu versions 10.04 and 10.10 with Oracle Open Office version 3.2 yes Oracle not Sun Systems. Here then is the surprise, if you look for this import tool in the Oracle extensions download section you are unlikely to find it that is because it is on Suns extension download section:-

http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/project/pdfimport

This will take you to this page:-

Scroll down the page and select the OS required, the download section indicates that this download is compatible with Open Office versions 3.x we have only tested on 3.2. Save your selected file for your Operating System to directory of your choosing.

To install this filter into Open Office first you need open the Open Office application and select Tools from the menu and then select Extensions Manager from the available list. You will then have the opportunity to Upload the pdf converter extension into the Extensions Manager.

To open a document previously created as a PDF select File from the menu and open, navigate your way to the directory where the PDF you wish to open is located you will be presented with a few options but the only one you need worry about is the option drop down be sure to select PDF and that's is it. Provided the PDF document you have opened is mainly text based you should be able to add and remove any text based content.

Note: I have used this plugin on many occasions with mixed results sometimes it successfully converts, most of the time it does not. To achieve a better import of a PDF file you are still better to use the Inkscape application, again not a good way to deal with documents as all objects are converted into graphics but at least you can edit the content