[Solved] ASCII Character Settings?

[foreboys]

I've used openoffice on a different computer with success and so I downloaded on my personal today. I went to open pdf files and it asked me for ASCII filter options. It's defaults are the Western Europe (ASCII US) with default fonts of Times New Roman and language English (USA). I hit OK and with every PDF I have it opens in just characters. This didn't happen to me before, did I do something wrong or is it something else?

Thanks.

Fore

[acknak]

OOo cannot open PDF files; the "ASCII Filter Options" dialog window is what you get when you open a type of file that OOo can't handle any other way--it's the last resort method to open a file.

[Hagar Delest]

Well, the Beta can in fact. Some threads about that here. See that one: Editing PDF's in OOo 3.0 Beta. But to keep the layout, better copy & paste the text from the PDF and reproduce the formatting yourself.

Thanks to add '[Solved]' at beginning of your first post title (edit button) if your issue has been fixed.

[foreboys]

Color me red and call me silly. I figured it out about 2 minutes afterwards. Thanks for your understanding of my limitations.
Fore

[acknak]

Well, the Beta can in fact.

Well, not quite.

At the risk of being ridiculously pedantic, the beta can use an extension that imports a PDF file as a Draw document. Even though this happens through File > Open, OOo doesn't actually open the PDF file.

This question made me think about what happens when OOo shows the ASCII Filter dialog. I just automatically cancel that dialog, as it's almost always a signal that something has gone wrong. However, if you confirm it and allow OOo to go ahead and open a file that it doesn't recognize, you're risking that OOo should clobber that file if you edit and save. Unless the file really is some kind of text file with an unusual encoding, you will almost surely corrupt the original file.

Maybe this behavior is useful somehow, but it seems like the risk may well outweigh any possible benefit.

Sorry, OOo's file handling is one of my pet peeves.