[thelist] PDFs & Internet Explorer

Susan Wallace susanhw at webcastle.com
Thu Dec 6 13:10:03 CST 2001


<snip>

>preinstalled on all of the company machines was showing blank documents
>for some PDFs, but we couldn't find any correllation between PDF creation
>settings and blank documents.
>
>Upgrading to the latest version of Acrobat Reader fixed it,

It has been my experience that if you create a pdf with Acrobat version 5, 
and attempt to read it with Reader version 4 that you will either get a 
blank document, or the images in your document will not display. I have not 
seen any way to save to an earlier version, so in our case, our Members are 
required to have the latest version of the Reader.

Fortunately for some, we created 99% of our 1G of pdf files in Acrobat 
version 4, but recently found that there were some features in Acrobat 
version 5 that would allow us to do more with the content for our members, 
so we upgraded in-house, and now recommend the latest plugin to Members.

We recently distributed some of our content on CD, and due to Adobe 
agreements, were not allowed to distribute versions of Acrobat older than 
version 4. Several people who have that CD have used it, along with the new 
version of Acrobat and have not complained about system problems, problems 
reading old pdf files or anything. So far it has not caused us trouble to 
require an upgrade.

I would suggest that if you have an older version of Acrobat, and don't 
want to force your users to upgrade, then use the older version to create 
your PDF files until you are pretty sure that most of your visitors have 
the latest plugin.

Sorry to ramble... hope this helps.

Susan Wallace





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