I pass on to you, without comment, two notes I got from Phil Scott. The first is below and the second follows it. Obviously there are some problems, but they are apparently not intentional. Mike ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Tue, 30 Oct 2007 00:43:27 -0400 (EDT) From: Phil Scott <phil@site.uottawa.ca> To: Michael Barr <barr@math.mcgill.ca> Subject: Re: categories: Re: Warning about Adobe 8 Hi Mike. I think I fixed it. I shut down, then rebooted, and it seems I can now use my original .pdf viewer and TeX previewer again. I hope. Boy do I hate Adobe. Phil On Tue, 30 Oct 2007, Phil Scott wrote:
Dear Mike: I installed Reader 8.1.1 a day before you sent the notice (on my Mac), on which I normally use a non Adobe .pdf viewer, and something called TeXShop, an excellent implementation of TeX for the Mac. Well, Adobe has hosed my system, and now the Apple .pdf viewer, as well as TeXshop are missing fonts, and all kinds of other things. I don't know how to fix it, either...
Phil
On Mon, 29 Oct 2007, Michael Barr wrote:
I have to admit that I never tested it, just copied the complaint from texhax, usually reliable. I just tried it on a file created by dvipdfm (I rarely use pdftex or pdflatex) and it seems fine. I have version 8.1.1. So perhaps it was an early bug, now corrected.
But my main point--that we cannot tie our future to commercial software that the proprietor can change at will--remains valid.
Michael
On Sun, 28 Oct 2007, Robert L Knighten wrote:
Michael Barr writes:
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. At TAC, we still consider the dvi to be the official format.
Michael
What is the context? I've been using Adobe Reader 8 on Windows since it first came out and have never seen this, very definitely including pdf files created by pdflatex on both Windows and Linux. As a quick check I just created a number of pdf files in various ways on both Windows and Linux and viewed them in both places using both Adobe Reader 7 and Adobe Reader 8 and was unable to see any difference at all.
-- Bob