On Fri, 06 Mar 2009 00:49:32 +0000 (GMT), Dave Plowman (News) wrote:

Makes me wonder what is so different about a document made today over
one made 15 years ago on a then competent DTP package?

In the case of pdf not an awful lot. The version I use is 3.0 (c) 1997 and
most of the time it can render pdfs fine. Colour Space is the thing that
normally trips it up but, IIRC, when I looked into that it was a
limitation of my OS rather than Acrobat.

It's only likely to be text and graphics so why should one be forced to
upgrade just to read it?

IMHO if you have a modern version of a program it should be capable of
reading and rendering all files produced by older versions and the
defaults for generating new ones should be as backwardly compatible as
possible. But commercial companies don't want that as it gives no push to
buying the "latest and greatest".

--
Cheers
Dave.