Re: Warning about Adobe 8

["Robert J. MacG. Dawson" <rdawson@cs.stmarys.ca>]

Michael Barr wrote:
> 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.

	Well, I suppose that whether or not this is an accidental bug (and
remember, as a famous corollary of Occam's Razor tells us, we should
never put down to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity)
it will be a short enough time before somebody finds out how Distiller
codes these glyphs and publicises it; and one upgrade after that before
everybody's DVI->PDF utility follows suit. This does not strike me as a
game that Adobe could play for long witout wrecking compatibility with
their *own* software.

	Alternatively, one could presumably remap the glyphs so that Acrobat 8
didn't realize what it was displaying.

>  At TAC, we still consider the dvi to be the official format.

	Fair enough, though dvi has its own "intellectual property" problems
with glyphs that the end user doesn't have a copy of.  Not such a
problem with TAC, I admit, but...

	-Robert