In article ,
"Dave Plowman (News)" writes:
In article ,
Appin wrote:
Until last week it was a very long time since I came across anyone who
had problems in that connection. Last week, granted, I had sent a file
which had been reduced from 10-MB to 5 MB for ease of emailing and the
recipient had problems because she had had only version 4 of Acrobat.
But then she didn't have broadband either :-). Nothing like the
problems of using Word, IME.

Makes me wonder what is so different about a document made today over one
made 15 years ago on a then competent DTP package? It's only likely to be
text and graphics so why should one be forced to upgrade just to read it?
Different matter with AV etc files I suppose.

Way back when PDF was first around, I used to do quite a bit of
work with generating postscript and PDF and EPS output for various
apps (PDF was originally basically a wrapper around postscript).

However, over the years, Adobe has been able to enhance it to
provide additional features such as form filling with protected
fields, document security and tracability features, and I would
guess wrapping a good deal more than just postscript nowadays
(although I'm not longer familiar with the possible types of
PDF you might build today).

Secondly, I would say that Adobe is very much the nice guy when
it comes to backwards compatibility. Acrobat reader 4 can still
open most acrobat 9 files, providing they don't absolutely require
some feature it doesn't have. That's in stark contrast to most
products in the software industry where everyone would have to be
on the latest version. It's not just Acrobat either -- I see the
same behaviour in things like Photoshop. I took a fancy
Photoshop 5 multi-layer image, and found I could happily open it
in Photoshop 2.something, even though the 2.something knew nothing
about layers, it still saw the full flattened image. Again, that's
just not the sort of attention to backwards compatibility I see in
most other software products, and is something Adobe is to be
commended for.

--
Andrew Gabriel
[email address is not usable -- followup in the newsgroup]