Re: Warning about Adobe 8

[Michael Barr <barr@math.mcgill.ca>]

I have to admit that I never tested it, just copied the complaint from
texhax, usually reliable.  I just tried it on a file created by dvipdfm (I
rarely use pdftex or pdflatex) and it seems fine.  I have version 8.1.1.
So perhaps it was an early bug, now corrected.

But my main point--that we cannot tie our future to commercial software
that the proprietor can change at will--remains valid.

Michael

On Sun, 28 Oct 2007, Robert L Knighten wrote:

> Michael Barr writes:
>  > Whatever you do, do not upgrade to Adobe reader 8.  I found this on the
>  > texhax list.
>  >
>  > >>Has anyone else been clobbered by the discovery that Adobe Acrobat 8
>  > >>tacitly suppresses all ligature glyphs of the fi, fl, ff, ffi, and ffl
>  > >>sort and displays blanks in their place.  They do this without warning,
>  > >>so that a file which displays perfectly well in Acrobat 7 is made
>  > >>unreadable in Acrobat 8.
>  > >>
>  >
>  > It turns out that files converted (from the ps file) by the distiller
>  > (which costs something like $500) do not have this problem.  I guess Adobe
>  > is tired of free use of their format.  At TAC, we still consider the dvi
>  > to be the official format.
>  >
>  > Michael
>  >
>
> What is the context?  I've been using Adobe Reader 8 on Windows since it first
> came out and have never seen this, very definitely including pdf files created
> by pdflatex on both Windows and Linux.  As a quick check I just created a
> number of pdf files in various ways on both Windows and Linux and viewed them
> in both places using both Adobe Reader 7 and Adobe Reader 8 and was unable to
> see any difference at all.
>
> -- Bob
>
>