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Max,
I have no problem with a tight spec; and I know all too well the joy of writing code to consume problematic PDFs.
The problem is that since the spec used to be loosely interpreted (i.e., not done right from the beginning) there are many, many customers out there using PDFs and PDF workflows that will break as the spec tightens. Not to mention that you also have to deal with OSes * OS printer drivers * Acrobat versions * PDF versions * output devices * probably a hundred different PDF-producing apps versions for testing.
In the past, developers had to write code and learn to accept any file PDF Acrobat would - otherwise customers would complain 'why does your app not read my file - it works in Reader'.
The problem is now the spec tightens without a "freely" available way for a developer to validate a file; and validating in a useful way is hard. There's also the problem of archives full of old PDF's that are still used, but now invalid - should Acrobat 6.0 make me change them just because the spec used to be loose? How do we hit a changing spec without a way to detect the changes? Last time I checked no documentation was available on what a new release of Acrobat would no longer support as far as PDF is concerned. I'll take a concrete spec and real validator any day.
Todd
On Wednesday, June 4, 2003, at 06:27 PM, Max Khesin wrote:
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Hi Todd,
this "ever-tightening set of PDF rules" was not ever tightening anything. It is called the PDF specification, and what you call
'tightening' is just the proper implementation of the specificaiton's 'contract'.
Please do everyone a favor and write spec-compliant files. IMO Adobe's lenient interpretation of file validity in Acrobat was a
weakness and should have never been done. It opens up room for incompatible file variations. If you want PDF to be the winner, and
to have lasting value, you want to make it easy for a 3d party software to understand your PDFs. The only real way to do that is to
write compliant files. If this was enforced by Acrobat in the first place the developers would have seen the problems very quickly
and fixed them. Instead we have these 'production' systems spitting out files whose Portable Document Format status it truly
questionable.
sorry for the tone, I just have seen enough problematic files to piss me off.
========================================
Max Khesin, software developer -
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[check out our image compression software at www.cvisiontech.com, JBIG2-PDF compression @
www.cvisiontech.com/cvistapdf.html]
----- Original Message ----- From: "Todd Kueny" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Wednesday, June 04, 2003 5:46 PM Subject: Re: [PDFdev] validator
PDFdev is a service provided by PDFzone.com | http://www.pdfzone.com _____________________________________________________________
Acrobat 4.0 was and is still a useful validation tool and many of our
production customers still use it - its the only one that still runs on
all the other Acrobat platforms (Solaris, HP/UX, etc.). In general it
is much more predictable than Acrobat 5.0 - particularly when
controlling page sizes. Because, as Leonard says, Acrobat 6.0 will be
more restrictive than prior versions, customers will be blind sided by
production files which will magically fail with a version upgrade, just
as they were with the 5.0 release.
Since no validator existed prior to PDF Consultant (which was just released, I suppose), it seems unfair to punish customers with an ever-tightening set of PDF rules that break in production (no pun intended) files.
Does any one else have customers experiencing these issues?
Todd
But a useful validator would have to know about the valid PDFs that are rejected by Acrobat, and the bad features that nevertheless display correctly.
I did something similar with PSAlter, for PostScript, but since validation was an afterthought, it only has about 20 items it specifically complains of in its "strict conformance" mode.
Aandi
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