Open Office Writer’s popularity as an open source word processing program has continued to increase over the past decade. Not only do you get a FREE word processing application when you choose to use Open Office Writer, but you also get a number of capabilities that are either not included with commercially produced word processors or cost you additional money to include the capabilities. One of the often used capabilities in Open Office Writer, is the ability to export documents to the PDF (Portable Document Format) from the application.
How to Export Documents to PDF
Exporting to PDF format from Open Office Writer is a relatively straightforward process. To export your work, conduct the following steps:
Step 1 – Open Open Office Writer by double clicking the program icon on the Windows desktop or by selecting from the system menu on other operating systems. Choose the Writer icon if you are presented with the Open Office application main panel.
Step 2 – Open the document that you desire to save as a PDF file by choosing the “File” and “Open” menu options and use the file chooser to select the document.
Step 3 – Click the “Export Directly as PDF” program icon in Writer to save the file in PDF format using the default settings in Writer.
Step 4 – Alternatively, select the “File” and “Export as PDF” menu options to open the “PDF Options” dialogue box.
Step 5 – Select the advanced configuration options that you desire followed by the “Export” and “Save” menu buttons to complete the “PDF Export of the file.
Open Office Writer PDF Export
Open Office Writer PDF Options Menu
For power or advanced users of the Open Office Writer application, you may have the need/desire to change some of the default PDF generation options. The “General” section of the options menu lets you choose from the following: range selection of the document to create the PDF, Pages to create the document, lossless compression to maintain quality of embedded images, reduce image resolution to reduce the size of the overall PDF, PDF/A-1 format to save in the 2005 ISO format, tagged PDF to export hyperlinks and table of contents, export bookmarks, and create PDF form.
Open Office Writer PDF Security Options
Open Office Writer also lets you configure the security of the PDF document created through the export feature. You can select from options that include: encrypting the document requiring a password to view, permissions password set to require a password to open the document with restricted permissions to include allowing or not allowing the PDF text to be copied by the viewer.
