The Investintech PDF Developer Tools team is going to be exhibiting live on location at the Microsoft Tech Ed 2008 Developer Conference in Orlando from June 2-6.

Will you be there? If so, come find us on the exhibition floor in Booth D1132 .

Microsoft made an announcement this week that the Office 2007 Service Pack 2, scheduled for early 2009, will finally provide users with native support for ODF and PDF.

Its own XPS OOXML format (aka “PDF Killer�), which caused so much controversy with ISO committees and users, has anticlimactically been put on the back burner. Native support for XPS will be included within the next version of the Office suite.

If asked to name your number one pet peeve about Adobe Reader or Acrobat, chances are you’d single out the large download size and slow start up speed for both.

Acrobat with all its advanced features is crammed into 320 MB. The Adobe Reader size itself is currently at 22.4 MB from the Adobe download page (and that’s without the Adobe Media Player addition of 12.3 MB). These sizes can mean the difference between a quick couple of seconds or a couple of seconds to get a cup of coffee.

However, sometimes we get questions and issues that can’t be resolved, which actually make for a good opportunity to clarify a few things about the PDF format itself. For instance, one Able2Extract-PDF-Word user sent in a question that reads:

When a PDF is converted back into a MS Word Document, can the changes that were made to the Word Document (before it was converted to a PDF initially) be seen?

Further details on the upcoming Acrobat 9 have been rising to the surface. And highlighted among the rumoured additions is integration with a new forms data-tracking service.The feature will give companies and PDF form creators an efficient way of handling the inputted data they collect.

Yet, as a user who fills those PDF forms out, you may be concerned with a simpler, more fundamental issue: can you transform those PDF forms into fill-able Word Documents?