Amid threats of a lawsuit from Adobe, Microsoft acknowledged Friday that it would remove support for saving files in PDF from Office 2007, as well as dropping its own rival format XPS from the productivity suite and Windows Vista.

The changes follow a breakdown of talks between the two technology giants after Microsoft announced last year it would include native PDF publishing with the release of Office 2007. The feature has long been a top request from customers, the company said at the time, and other office suites have the capability.

But Adobe was unhappy with the move and a dispute has been brewing for four months, Microsoft's lead counsel Brad Smith said Friday. Although PDF claims to be an open format and is integrated into OpenOffice and Apple's Mac OS X operating system, Adobe apparently sees Office 2007 as a real threat to its business.

Adobe wants Microsoft to charge for the feature, which the Redmond company has refused to do. Smith said Adobe threatened to file an antitrust suit in Europe, and his company was preparing for that eventuality. Now, however, Microsoft says it will make the feature available through a downloadable add-on.

"PDF is usually viewed as an open standard and there are other office suites out there that already support PDF output. I don't see us providing functionality that's any different from what others are doing," remarked Microsoft's Office Open XML format lead Brian Jones in a blog posting.

News source: BetaNews