Question about PDF manipulation

[Scott Stevens]

On Fri, 3 Jun 2005 13:01:48 -0700
"vrs" <vrs at msn.com> wrote:

> From: "der Mouse" <mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca>
> > As of 2005-01-30 I found
> > http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/en/pdf/PDFReference16.pdf,
> > and it was there when I checked sometime later this year (I don't
> > have any record of that date).
> >
> > I note it's a PDF file, which makes for an amusing checken-and-egg
> > problem in principle. :-)
> 
> Even in practice, since the darned thing appears to be in PDF 1.6
> format(which my Acrobat 4.0 doesn't seem able to read).
> 
>     Vince
> 
The 'feature creep' problem with Adobe Acrobat is one of the things that
really bugs me about it.  I paid full retail for Version 3.0 and then
Version 4.0.  Now I find that I have to download a crummy 'free reader'
to even read a lot of the PDF documents available online.  And then the
crummy 'free' reader' takes over the PDF extension in Windoze.  Adobe is
screwing up, pissing off paying customers, by allowing 'feature creep'
into the spec.  Use a different extension than 'PDF' if you're going to
break the format.  It gets me mad enough to refuse to create PDF files
with newer than 3.0 features.  But am I screwing things up for people
who paid for the 2.0 product?

Adobe is a lot like Microsoft, with their Office file formats.