[pdftex] Acrobat Reader 4.0 bug, incompatible with pdftex?

[Ben Crowell]

A couple of weeks ago, I ran into a problem with viewing
pdftex output using Acrobat Reader. I posted on comp.text.tex
about it, and started collecting data about when the problem
showed up. The problem is that text inside PDF figures gets
garbled, with, typically, half the characters being omitted,
so that "insert tab A in slot B" becomes "i se t  ab A i  slo  B."
Someone else just posted on comp.text.tex about the same
problem, so it seems to be something a lot of people are
running into, and I thought I'd post about it here.

AFAICT, it's a bug in AR 4.0 and earlier, and it's fixed
by upgrading to AR 5.0. It would be interesting if anyone with
a deeper knowledge of pdftex could provide further insight.
For an example of a document afflicted with the problem,
see this book:
   http://www.lightandmatter.com/area1sn.html   ,
or I'm sure you can come up with your own minimal example.

Although it seems to be a bug in AR, rather than pdftex,
it would also be great if anyone could think of a way to
make pdftex output be compatible with AR 4.0 and earlier.
AR 5.0 is a big download, and is a slow-loading piece of
bloatware, so I think a lot of users are going to resist
upgrading to it.