{"id":44,"date":"2009-12-02T04:00:08","date_gmt":"2009-12-02T04:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.garfnet.org.uk\/wordpress\/2009\/12\/02\/another-very-good-reason-not-to-trust-large-american-corporations\/"},"modified":"2009-12-02T04:59:01","modified_gmt":"2009-12-02T04:59:01","slug":"another-very-good-reason-not-to-trust-large-american-corporations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/garfnet.org.uk\/wordpress\/2009\/12\/02\/another-very-good-reason-not-to-trust-large-american-corporations\/","title":{"rendered":"Another very good reason not to trust large American corporations"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The other day, I exported a pile of OpenOffice.org documents to Portable Document Format via its built in PDF exporter.\u00c2\u00a0 When I sent them to a friend &#8211; who is sadly still saddled with Microsoft Windoze. She soon started moaning that the PDF&#8217;s I sent her had returned an &#8220;<em>invalid colorspace<\/em>&#8221; 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&#8217;t be bothered to produce a 64-bit version of its reader for Linux anyway!<\/p>\n<p>Nevertheless, I did a bit of reading around the subject:-<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a title=\"Discussion on Adobe forums\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/forums.adobe.com\/message\/2433663\">http:\/\/forums.adobe.com\/message\/2433663<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a title=\"Discussion on Ubuntu bug report site\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/bugs.launchpad.net\/ubuntu\/+source\/openoffice.org\/+bug\/305557\">https:\/\/bugs.launchpad.net\/ubuntu\/<br \/>\n+source\/openoffice.org\/+bug\/305557<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Turns out that the latest Adobe Acrobat Reader no longer reads <em>PDF\/a-1a, <\/em>long-term-archive files as produced by OpenOffice.org. Now I wonder why that could be? Let&#8217;s see&#8230;<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Early versions of Acrobat reader worked perfectly and could read all PDF files produced by free, open source PDF creators.<\/li>\n<li>All the open source readers, Evince, kPDF et al also worked perfectly &#8211; and still do!<\/li>\n<li>Adobe has largest market share for PDF <em>readers<\/em> but is concerned by the increase in popularity of free, open source PDF <em>creators<\/em> because Acrobat, its own PDF creator costs an arm and a leg and is highly profitable.<\/li>\n<li>Suddenly Adobe brings out a version of its PDF reader that no longer reads <em>PDF\/a-1a, long-term-archive<\/em> files, produced by free, open source PDF creators.<\/li>\n<li>PDF files produced by free, open source PDF creators are now effectively rendered useless, especially for long-term archiving purposes.<\/li>\n<li>Moreover the problem remains unfixed and ignored for many months.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>I wonder if anyone can spot a pattern emerging here?<\/p>\n<p>The moral of the story, my little goslings, is <strong>never, ever trust your data to the proprietary format belonging to a large American corporation<\/strong>!<\/p>\n<p>Honk! Honk!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The other day, I exported a pile of OpenOffice.org documents to Portable Document Format via its built in PDF exporter.\u00c2\u00a0 When I sent them to a friend &#8211; who is sadly still saddled with Microsoft Windoze. She soon started moaning that the PDF&#8217;s I sent her had returned an &#8220;invalid colorspace&#8221; error in her Acrobat &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/garfnet.org.uk\/wordpress\/2009\/12\/02\/another-very-good-reason-not-to-trust-large-american-corporations\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Another very good reason not to trust large American corporations&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,2,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-grumble","category-information","category-weblog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/garfnet.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/garfnet.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/garfnet.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garfnet.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garfnet.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/garfnet.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/garfnet.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garfnet.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garfnet.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}