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Topic: PDF Version
Conf: (P-PDF) Acrobat 7, Msg: 122716
From: aandi
Date: 11/24/2004 08:43 AM

>It's my understanding that
>with the release of Acrobat 6,
>we also saw a new version of PDF
>1.5(?)

Yes. As with each Acrobat.

> - the only annoying
>part of this
>was that Acrobat 5, wouldn't
>process these files (save as,
>export
>etc.) so one required Acrobat
>6 in order to do anything with
>them.

It may be that this was intentional because PDF 1.5 did include new features that might be lost if Acrobat 5 saved them. Earlier versions of Acrobat would have gone ahead and lost them anyway.

>I'm also under the impression
>(and I could be wrong) that
>the
>major difference between PDF
>1.4 and 1.5 was transparency
>support and a handful of other
>features.

No, transparency support was added in PDF 1.4 in a really annoying way, so there was no error in Acrobat 4.0 if a file had transparency. In my view this was a very bad thing.

Key new things in PDF 1.5 included JPEG 2000 compression, and especially compressed objects. These could make for much smaller PDF files but were incompatible with older Acrobats. A special mode allowed tags to be compressed and other objects not, so Acrobat 5 didn't see the tags but saw everything else; however a SAVE AS would lose them.

>Also annoying was
>acrobat 5.0 PDFs opened in 6.0
>were re-saved as 6.0 PDFs and
>not editable on Acrobat 5.

Every version of Acrobat has done this.
>
>Does Acrobat 7.0 signify
>another PDF version?

That is to be expected.

>Will we
>still be able
>to open and save and mark-up
>Acrobat 7 PDFs in Acrobat 6.0?

I suspect Acrobat 7 users should take care to make files compatible with their audience. Just like Acrobat 6, I'd hope the PDF Optimizer would be there.

>Does anyone know about affects
>Acrobat 7 might have on
>PrePress workflows?

RIPs will need updating, and are likely to reject PDF 1.6 files until they are. This is the major issue with PDF RIPs every time Acrobat is upgraded.