"PDF documents provide a great way to pass around documents on the Internet. They have many uses, such as sending quotes and invoices to business clients. Two of the main reasons the PDF format is so popular is that it preserves all of the document's formatting exactly and it is easily viewable on almost all platforms.
I realise that Phil is quoting from Adobes guff but I can't resist winging to people that sometimes PDF does not preserve all of the document's formatting exactly.
It can and sometimes does substitute Arial font for an embedded Helvetica font when used on Windows platforms; and no Arial != Helvetica. Both have the same metrics so the glyph heights/widths will be identical but the shape of the 'font' is slightly different.
I have seen some amazing pages when viewing PDF files on IRIX and Linux systems that didnt have the fonts available for viewing the document. Pages where the white and black were inversed within the glyph box but outside it. How do you know if your reader will have the fonts to view your PDF? You don't.
Some bugs with the ubiquitous Acroreader are documented at: http://www.micropress-inc.com/acr6bugs.htm http://www.micropress-inc.com/acr5bugs.htm
My biggest gripe is that the reader is brain dead. When I update the PDF files I have to close the Acroreader and reopen the file again. Some Tex/LatEx packages on windows use a DLL command to get acroread to reread the file but it then goes back to bloody page one again. xdvi is faster and rereads the open files if it changes.
-- Michael Lake Chemistry, Materials & Forensic Science, UTS Ph: 9514 1725 Fx: 9514 1460
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