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Adobe Acrobat Reader 5x and newly created pdfs

users have adobe acrobat reader 5.5 installed. users are starting to call and state they they receive some sort of error when trying to open a pdf that a customer has sent them. From what I understand if a pdf was created with a newer version of adobe acrobat ( 7 , 8, or 9?) then this pdf will not be able to be viewed with version 5x reader.

I need to find out specifics. Is it pdfs created in version 9 only or 8 and 9 that cannot be opened with 5x. Is 5x no longer supported by adobe? Why cant 5x open the newer pdfs? Whic version should we upgrade to to get around this problem? 7, 8, or 9?

I googled and when on adobes website but couldnt find anything specific

Thanks

captain

Hi

virtually every new version of Acrobat introduced a new PDF version, have a look at the history on the wiki entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Document_Format

So in answer to your question, it depends:

If your PDFs are created with a certain version the versions below won't or struggle to open. There are options to save backward compatible but they are out of your control.

Commercially I doubt that any upgrade below 9 makes sense, as you run into the same problem again but you may want to do a trial though as the user interface has changed somewhat.

hth
capt.

Jared Luker

If you don't want to upgrade your users Acrobat reader, then you could install something like FoxIt's PDF reader for the newer PDF's that 5.5 can't handle. You can have both on your system.

It's true that if a PDF was not saved with compatibility in mind, there is nothing you can do to open them other than opening them in a newer PDF reader.

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scrathcyboy

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master_windu

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I was hoping that there would be something officially documented on adobes site. Does adobes product page for Acrobat 9 Pro make no mention at all of the incompatibility? Something like.. "PDFs created with version 9 cannot be viewed any version of acrobat reader below v7" I would think that this would be clearly pointed out since I know there are still many computers out there with version 5 and 6 reader.

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