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Re: [Athen] Update: PDF Maker problems

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From: chagnon
Date: Sep 29, 2021 7:31AM

The export utilities by Adobe and Microsoft / Foxit are constantly leapfrogging each other, plus each can convert different parts of your Word content differently. Tables and footnotes are 2 examples that come quickly to mind.

Therefore, we recommend that our clients try both and see which method gives the best PDF for that particular Word document at that particular time. Guaranteed, the results will be different just a few months or weeks later when Microsoft, Foxit, or Adobe upgrade something. Hence, the leapfrogging effect.

To make the best choice, it might help to understand more about the PDF file format and the standards.

Adobe originally created the PDF file format in the late 1980s – early 1990s. Only Adobe's products could make and read a PDF file, and the Acrobat family of products eventually dominated the workplace for file exchange across platforms and between computer users.

In 2008, Adobe donated the PDF file format (not Acrobat, the software programs) to the ISO and it became an open standard (ISO 32000, to be specific) that today, is managed by ISO delegates and the PDF Association (disclaimer, I am a US delegate to the ISO and my firm is a member of the PDFa.org).

Any company can read the PDF standards and create programs to create, edit, and process PDF files because the standards are no longer proprietary to Adobe. Today we have hundreds of companies that create programs for PDFs. Maybe thousands.

But in the real world, Adobe's engineers are front and center on the ISO committees and working groups that create and manage the PDF standards. They are the most knowledgeable about the PDF format than any others in the world — in spite of the idiotic, bone-headed screw-ups they just put into the last update to Acrobat and the PDF Maker plug-in.

Foxit, CommonLook, and other companies mentioned in this thread are members of the PDF Association, but membership in the ISO committees, while not hidden, is also not broadcast either. It's an ISO thing. Those of us who are ISO members are there to work objectively to improve the standards, regardless of how our work affects our individual companies. So I do not know if Foxit is on the ISO standards committees.

My firm works with several companies that have software to create PDFs, and each one looks at Adobe-made PDFs and analyses them as they create their own PDF tools. I sure hope they don't repeat the bone-headed problems Adobe just released, but I would not be surprised if we started to see PathPathPath from their products, too.

Bottom line: don't blindly trust any of them.
Always test and verify the software's capabilities every few months.

—Bevi
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Bevi Chagnon | Designer, Accessibility Technician | <EMAIL REMOVED>
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