I have a couple of Word Docs that I want to put up on a website. Not everyone has Word, and it’s not fully compatible across operating systems and different versions of Office. Plus, you actually have to download the document to view it. This is less-than-optimal, so I thought about alternatives. Certainly I could convert it to an Adobe PDF (Portable Document Format), and this would ensure that it looks the same on all computers, but it’s extremely slow to load on most computers I’ve worked with.

The latest versions of Acrobat do load themselves into memory on startup, providing for a much faster user experience when they actually do need to open a PDF. But this isn’t acceptable because not everyone has the latest version of Acrobat; I’m sure there are lots of people who simply hate the format (like I did) because it was so dreadfully slow in the past.

I had read before about Flash PDF viewers, I thought, so this would be a good alternative. But a little Googling couldn’t find me a solution, so I thought a little harder. Flash PDF converter? That got me a little closer, but still nothing that could actually convert the PDF into a SWF. Nothing that’s free, anyway.

Luckily, Adobe themselves offer an alternative: FlashPaper. I purchased an educational version of Macromedia Studio 8, which includes it, so this is software I already had. I just hadn’t used it yet. So I fired it up.

It’s a very simple initial interface, with very little to point you in the right direction about using it. So I tried dragging-and-dropping the .doc file into the window. No go: file format not supported. It suggests using “Print” from whatever editor I use for the filetype. Well, I had already exported 2 PDFs, so I dropped those in. It worked, BUT…

They were rotated the wrong way. The PDFs were oriented correctly, but the FlashPaper was not (see the screenshot at the beginning of my post). Furthermore, there was no way in FlashPaper to rotate it. D’oh! Acrobat offers rotation, but FlashPaper does not. How did it get rotated?

So I opened the docs in StarOffice Writer and Printed it to FlashPaper. But this time I opened the Properties… dialog and changed the orientation from Portrait to Landscape.

That did the trick.

StarOffice, including StarOffice Writer, offers Export to PDF built-in. It’s a free option with the Google Pack: