Unfortunately, not all file managers and PDF viewers seem able to signal embedded documents in hybrid PDFs (Okular, for example, keeps the “Embedded Files” entry grayed out in Figure B): Many companies probably would not want to publish online PDF brochures, reports and what not… that also include the ODF original document, fully editable, and with plenty of potentially sensitive metadata. The troubles start the day when you find yourself with many files, maybe created years before or by somebody else, and no clue as to which ones are normal PDFs, and which ones are hybrid files.īeing able to make this distinction is more important than you may think, at least for businesses. The normal PDF is much bigger, and the size of the hybrid one (called 7tips_aoo_lo_emb.pdf to highlight that it embeds the original document) is just a few bytes more than the sum of the first two.Īs you can see in Figure A, LibreOffice (or Apache OpenOffice) has no problem to recognize exactly what type of PDF you told it to open: the normal PDF was opened by Draw, while the ODF component of the hybrid PDF was seen and directly opened by Writer. odt file (being nothing but a ZIP archive) is the smallest one. The first, obvious difference between the several files was their size: hybrid_pdfs]$ ls -l test/7tips_aoo_lo* 35393 May 24 19:35 7tips_aoo_lo.odt 60782 May 24 19:35 7tips_aoo_lo.pdf 96371 May 24 19:35 7tips_aoo_lo_emb.pdf To show you some (lack of) properties of hybrid PDFs, I exported the OpenDocument version of my previous post (called 7tips_aoo_lo.odt) to both normal and hybrid PDF formats. For example… How do you recognize hybrid PDFs? However, if you start thinking about the implications, things become more interesting and deserve more looking into. If this were the whole story, there would be no need to write another post about it.
This lets you distribute “read-only” documents that look exactly as you intended, but are still completely editable if necessary.
This week I’ll look in detail to some implications of the sixth feature, Hybrid PDFs.ĭefining and creating such files with either OpenOffice and LibreOffice is, as explained in that other post, really simple: select File | Export as PDF, tick the “Embed OpenDocument file” box, and you’ll get a PDF document that embeds a complete copy of the original OpenDocument file. My last post lists seven great, little-known features of OpenOffice and LibreOffice. Here's a tip for sorting out the difference. If you have many PDF files to manage, it may become difficult to tell which are uneditable and which are hybrid (editable). OpenOffice and LibreOffice: How to manage hybrid PDFs
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