Measuring Office Format Compatibility with Acrobat 9

By Jason Brooks

Compare Documents

Acrobat’s new Compare Documents feature analyzes two PDF documents and identifies all of the inconsistencies between them. I opened the same Word document in Office 2007 and OpenOffice.org, converted both documents to PDFs, and turned Acrobat 9 on the pair.

Acrobat 9 provided a brief summary of the changes between the two documents I was comparing. Interestingly, the OpenOffice.org-rendered document made for a larger PDF document than did its Office-rendered cousin. I could see the changes by scrolling through the documents, but it would have been better if Acrobat listed out the changes on this overview page.

OpenOffice.org rendered a 935-by-227-pixel logo at 936 by 234 pixels-

There was another odd, though slight, inconsistency in the document’s table of contents: OpenOffice.org rendered 146 periods between the section name and page number, while Office rendered 145 periods.

For the most part, OpenOffice.org handled my test Word document well.

OpenOffice.org rendered double dashes from the Word document as em dashes-

Acrobat 9 highlighted a chunk of misplaced text as a new insertion, but this inconsistency stemmed from a pagination error on the part of OpenOffice.org.

Acrobat 9 flagged a missing table header row as having been deleted, but the row had strayed to the previous page.

Elsewhere in my test document, Acrobat 9 correctly flagged a document element as having been moved from one page to another, rather than having been deleted from one place and inserted in another.

In several portions of the document I analyzed, Acrobat 9 reported, somewhat mysteriously, that the “other” attribute had changed.

I downloaded a test version of the upcoming OpenOffice.org Version 3 and compared that version’s Word document rendering with that of OpenOffice.org 2.4-

Since support for Microsoft’s new Office Open XML formats is one of the new features in OpenOffice.org 3.0, I fetched another document from Microsoft’s Web site-

The troubles that the OpenOffice.org 3.0 beta encountered with OOXML included misplaced images and jumbled bullet lists. I expect to see the suite improve its handling of OOXML documents as it moves closer to its release.