[pdftex] acrobat 5

[Y&Y Support]

At 18:16 2001-05-24 +0200, Hans Hagen wrote:

>all) or maybe i've missed some important settings? (Given that i encounter
>some more bugs, as well as that other bugs are reported on this list), if I
>had that large a company as adobe, i would put some people on testing
>before shipping -)

It is possible to get on their beta test list, although not easy.

But remember that "fixing bugs does not sell upgrades,"
while "adding many new features" apparently does, even if
noone in his right mind uses them.

Also, Adobe like most large software companies apparently has a number of
interesting policies such as:
(i) do not keep a test suite of cases that led to problems in the past;
(ii) do not keep a list of bugs in previous versions to make sure they are 
not repeated;
(iii) do not keep programmers around from the last set of revisions --- always
hire new ones, and promote good programmers to management and marketing;
(iv) do not respond at all to bug reports in between development cycles ---
simply discard them, since at that time no programmer is assigned to the 
product;
(v)  make it next to impossible to report bugs (it cost me $20 of
"technical support" phone time to report a bug in Distiller - which,
of course, was not fixed);
(vi) build a force shield to insulate developers from users to make sure
they do not make the mistake of wasting precious time on fixing bugs,
or listening to users requests;

One consequence is that we have seen the same bugs repeated on a regular 
basis,
more or less every time a new release of an application comes out --- just
when it comes to fonts for e.g.:
(i) treat strings as null delimited - causing problems with character code 0;
(ii) treat control characters (0--31) incorrectly;
(iii) do not deal correctly with repeated encoding (glyphname appears in more
than one place in encoding vector);
(iv) crash when the size of the Subr vector is smaller *or* larger than 
required;
(v) crash when the size of the CharStrings array is smaller *or* larger 
than required.
(vi) crash when there are no Subrs or no OtherSubrs;
etc. etc.

Regards, Louis.


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