Wednesday, October 18, 2006

Free Open Office word processor does encrypted PDF and LaTex

The new version of OpenOffice.org 2.0.4 has more features for producing documents in PDF and LaTex.

You can put a password on a PDF document to limit access to it. You can also restrict printing or editing of the PDF. But keep in mind that the security of these features is limited and should not be used for very sensitive documents. The PDF generation is quick, even with all the options turned on.

Also OOO has a LaTex export option. You can open a Microsoft Word document in OOO and export it as LaTex. This uses OOO's plugin XML filter function, making it relatively slow. The LaTex produced is limited. The system is supposed to also export BibTex bibliographic entries, but I didn't have any to try it on:
Feature list for the latex export filter
Note: We can not establish any further contact to the developer so I write this Changes mail on basis of the features I found while testing. The filter enables us to export (not too complex) Openoffice.org Writer files into the latex format. The filter enables us to export bibliography entries into the tex docbook format. The latex filter is able to export the following content - Tables - Indexes - Headers - Lists (just numbered list bullet list will be transformed into numbered lists) - Sub- and superscript - Header - Footer - Foot-/Endnotes - Italic and bold text (underlines will not be exported) - By tex supported Fonts (Font sizes will be set to a default size) - Content of sections and frames (not the frames and sections themselves) - Math-Ole objects (formulas) Note: Because pictures are not exported, there will be a text information („missing link to picture“) at the respective position.

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