Best Free PDF Utility for Windows ... Again?

[Edgar D' Souza]

Shot in the dark... no, twilight! ;-) Can OOo 2.0's PDF Export do the trick?

http://openoffice.blogs.com/openoffice/2006/01/think_pdf_openo.html
[quote]
In OpenOffice.org 2.0, the links you make in OpenOffice.org transfer
over to and work in the PDF
[endquote]

OTOH, (2004 vintage, so probably describes OOo 1.x):
"The biggest limitation is that files converted to PDF using OOo,
either by using its built-in export-as-PDF function or by printing to
a PostScript file and distilling using Adobe Acrobat, do not have
bookmarks or working internal links like they do when created from
Word or FrameMaker. This limitation may be a showstopper for some
requirements."
(http://www.windowsdevcenter.com/pub/a/windows/2004/08/24/openofficewriter.html?page=last
)

Is this any help? Or was OOo the first thing you tried and
discarded... if so, would appreciate if you tell us why, when you have
the free time.

Regards,
Ed.

On 8/17/06, Lou Quillio <public at quillio.com> wrote:
> Thanks for all of these suggestions, everyone.
>
> Amongst the free options, it seems that none have yet hit the level
> of functionality I'm after -- which is awareness of MS Word's
> internal link scheme and the ability to parse a Word TOC into PDF
> bookmarks.
>
> I'll be taking a look at GhostWord in the morning (thanks, Mike),
> but I think it'll come up short.
> (http://ghostword.sourceforge.net/)
>
> Naturally, Acrobat can do what I want, and several other commercial
> products do, too, some inexpensive.  (Again, RoboPDF got the
> bookmarks and most other things right, but introduced an unrelated
> show-stopper.)  I've used most of the cheap ones before
> (http://www.quillio.com/item.php?id=101_0_1_0_M)
>
> This is for work -- where we're disposed against proprietary
> toolchains and source formats because we luckily don't need them.
> *Everybody* codes and scripts, including execs and including me, and
> our customers are devs, too.  Yet there are some legacy documents,
> and sometimes the easiest thing to do is tweak that old Word doc and
> spit-out a respectable PDF, then move on.
>
> Looks like no joy on the quick-and-dirty.  It's not critical and
> I'll work around it.  Soon enough there'll be no more legacy cruft,
> anyhow.  Making sure of that.