www.acrobat.com

Adobe, makers of Photoshop, Illustrator and numerous other industry standard graphical applications have just launced a new free online service.

The star of the show in my opinion will be the Free Online PDF Convertor service.

You have to sign up and login to use the service, but once you do you can convert:

• Text (.txt)
• Rich text (.rtf)
• Microsoft Office Documents (.doc, .xls, .ppt, .prj)
• Open Office (.odt, .odp, .ods, .odg, .odf)
• Star Office (.swx, .sxi, .sxc, .sxd, .stw)
• Word Perfect (.wpd)
• Raster (.bmp, .gif, .jpeg, .jpg, .tif, .tiff, .png) and Postscript (.ps) images

Anyone that has ever tried to convert Word Docs to PDFs using free or paid for plugins/software can be a lot of hassle. A year or so ago I went through at least 15 different plugins before I found one that did the job without leaving a trial watermark.

Since then I have had two dicoveries: first that Open Office Writer has a built in PDF convertor - which is great to use. Sometimes there are issues with how Open Office deals with Word Docs... but its generally pretty good. Leading well on to my next point... unfortunately Open Office as yet cannot work with Microsoft Word 2007 Docx files... but if you have Word 2007 there is now an official Microsoft PDF convertor you can download from here

It would be a good idea of Adobe to make sure they build in Docx conversion as soon as possible.

Adobe Buzzword is a tool for hosting and sharing douments with colleagues.

There is no storage limit which is nice so in theory you can store unlimited documents there.

There other party will have to sign up for Buzzword if they want to view your document.

The launch coincides with Adobe Acrobat 9 - which includes support for Adobe / Macromedia Flash videos!