The other day, I exported a pile of OpenOffice.org documents to Portable Document Format via its built in PDF exporter. When I sent them to a friend – who is sadly still saddled with Microsoft Windoze. She soon started moaning that the PDF’s I sent her had returned an “invalid colorspace” error in her Acrobat reader. I never noticed the problem. On my lappy, I have several open source PDF readers that all work fine. Besides, it seems that Adobe can’t be bothered to produce a 64-bit version of its reader for Linux anyway!
Nevertheless, I did a bit of reading around the subject:-
- http://forums.adobe.com/message/2433663
- https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/
+source/openoffice.org/+bug/305557
Turns out that the latest Adobe Acrobat Reader no longer reads PDF/a-1a, long-term-archive files as produced by OpenOffice.org. Now I wonder why that could be? Let’s see…
- Early versions of Acrobat reader worked perfectly and could read all PDF files produced by free, open source PDF creators.
- All the open source readers, Evince, kPDF et al also worked perfectly – and still do!
- Adobe has largest market share for PDF readers but is concerned by the increase in popularity of free, open source PDF creators because Acrobat, its own PDF creator costs an arm and a leg and is highly profitable.
- Suddenly Adobe brings out a version of its PDF reader that no longer reads PDF/a-1a, long-term-archive files, produced by free, open source PDF creators.
- PDF files produced by free, open source PDF creators are now effectively rendered useless, especially for long-term archiving purposes.
- Moreover the problem remains unfixed and ignored for many months.
I wonder if anyone can spot a pattern emerging here?
The moral of the story, my little goslings, is never, ever trust your data to the proprietary format belonging to a large American corporation!
Honk! Honk!