PDF support in openoffice

[Jon Bosak <Jon.Bosak@sun.com>]

With regard to previous discussions of office software to use for
OASIS TCs, the members of this TC may be interested to know that
the current openoffice release (openoffice 1.1 beta) now supports
direct export of PDF.  I downloaded and installed this when I
needed to make a PDF version of a slide presentation that would
not gracefully run through the usual acrobat distiller routine,
and it worked great.  I've been using 1.1b for about a week now,
and despite its beta status, 1.1b seems to be at least as good as
1.0 and now lets everyone produce PDF versions of the OASIS
openoffice format without buying any additional software.

I already had a recent version (1.4.1) of the Java runtime
installed and so didn't run into any installation problems with
openoffice, but the usual caveats apply: uninstall any previous
version of openoffice, uninstall any old Java runtime, go to

   1.4.1 http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.1/index.html

for (what I believe is) the latest runtime -- note that you don't
need the whole JDK, just the runtime -- install that, and then
install 1.1 from openoffice.org.

Free open-source software producing free and open data formats!
It's been a long time coming.

Jon