Martin over at gHacks recently posted about Microsoft’s Office 2007 plugin that saves documents as PDF:

Microsoft is offering a plugin on their homepage that adds pdf support to Office 2007 adding PDF as one of the options in the Save As dialog. That’s probably the most effective way to add support for PDF documents to Microsoft Office 2007.

I’ve been using this plugin with OneNote 2007 for some time now and thought I’d share some experiences with the product.

When using the Save As PDF function the Options button will call up the following dialog box:

Most of the options are similar to those you would get when using a virtual printer to create a PDF document.  The most significant difference is the "Create bookmarks using" option.  Creating active bookmarks (hyperlinks) within a PDF is the most compelling reason for using this plugin over a virtual printer solution.  By default the plugin will embed working links (e.g. a Word document’s table of contents will be interactive), with the "Create bookmarks using" option allowing you to extend the link support to make all headings visible in the Acrobat Reader’s Bookmarks navigation pane as well.  This link creation is something no virtual printer solution I’m aware of is capable of doing, and Adobe’s Office plugin is the only other tool I’ve used that can create working bookmarks in converted Office documents.

Unfortunately I have encountered one significant issue with the plugin.  I usually do my diagramming in Visio then copy the results into Word using Paste As Special (EMF).  This keeps the Word file size down without visually impacting the diagram on screen or paper.  When I skimmed through the PDF conversion of one Word document I noticed this in one of the embedded pictures:

The same diagram looked like this in the original document and after conversion to PDF via a virtual printer:

Obviously the plugin doesn’t work well with gradients in EMF diagrams.  I’ve yet to find an option to overcome this or a workaround that keeps Word document size down and diagrams accurate in the conversion output.

For documents that don’t include diagrams with gradients, Microsoft’s PDF plugin is my preferred way to convert documents to PDF.  For all other documents virtual printing (or Adobe’s commercial plugin) will still be the only way to give acceptable conversion results.