Michael Barr wrote:
Whatever you do, do not upgrade to Adobe reader 8. I found this on the texhax list.
Has anyone else been clobbered by the discovery that Adobe Acrobat 8 tacitly suppresses all ligature glyphs of the fi, fl, ff, ffi, and ffl sort and displays blanks in their place. They do this without warning, so that a file which displays perfectly well in Acrobat 7 is made unreadable in Acrobat 8.
It turns out that files converted (from the ps file) by the distiller (which costs something like $500) do not have this problem. I guess Adobe is tired of free use of their format.
Well, I suppose that whether or not this is an accidental bug (and remember, as a famous corollary of Occam's Razor tells us, we should never put down to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity) it will be a short enough time before somebody finds out how Distiller codes these glyphs and publicises it; and one upgrade after that before everybody's DVI->PDF utility follows suit. This does not strike me as a game that Adobe could play for long witout wrecking compatibility with their *own* software. Alternatively, one could presumably remap the glyphs so that Acrobat 8 didn't realize what it was displaying.
At TAC, we still consider the dvi to be the official format.
Fair enough, though dvi has its own "intellectual property" problems with glyphs that the end user doesn't have a copy of. Not such a problem with TAC, I admit, but... -Robert