[tex-live] [pdftex] PDF 1.5 by default in TL 2010

James Quirk jjq at galcit.caltech.edu
Wed Jan 13 15:00:11 CET 2010


> Not on the same machine! installing newer versions of AR implies
> uninstalling old versions even of AA (if I understood correctly the
> acronyms used by Phil...). Acrobat 5 was a really good, reliable, and
This is a problem on Windows/OS X. With Linux, however, there
is no problem having multiple versions of AR on the one machine. 

> affordable (especially if you're in education) piece of software.
> Moreover, you had free plug-ins by e.g. Enfocus (or commercial
> extensions by the same): I am sure that in many workflows,
> professional or not, keeping AA 5 has been preferred to an endless
> upgrading (thus plug-ins as well, etc.).
Don't forget there's always the security angle to consider,
as older versions of AR/AA have buffer flow problems that can be
exploited by malicious PDFs. Therefore if you're going to stick
with AR5/6/7/8, be aware of the risks involved.

> 
> It is funny to observe that while the trend for the ubiquitous format
> like XML (do you see a strong demand for compressed SVG?) is to have
> hyper-verbose uncompressed representation of content, we should care
> so much about the size of PDF files. I've been told that most text
> file transfer over the networks are compressed on the fly by the
> routers (?) so that the actual impact on bandwidth might be zero.
Is a PDF considered a text file? I thought the whole idea of
the four binary bytes after the header were to inform routing software
that they're dealing with a binary file.

James
> 
>  Thierry
> 


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