[pdftex] [tex-live] PDF 1.5 by default in TL 2010

[Heiko Oberdiek]

On Tue, Jan 12, 2010 at 05:14:22PM +0100, Manuel Pegourie-Gonnard wrote:

> Philip TAYLOR a écrit :
> >For me, Adobe Acrobat 5.0.5 was the last successful
> >version before Adobe started to split out functionality
> >into so-called "Professional" and "Professional Extended"
> >versions, and therefore remains my choice even today.
> >Thus I would want to be able to view any PDFs generated
> >using TeX Live 2010 in Adobe Acrobat 5.0.5 or Adobe
> >Acrobat Reader 5.0.5.  I am far less interested in
> >how small or how large my PDFs are, since I can always
> >compress them using Adobe Acrobat 5.0.5.
> >
> So, assume you receive a document in PDF 1.5 format. Is it very
> inconvenient for you to read, or can you cope with it?

If \pdfobjcompresslevel is set, then AR 5 isn't able to view
the file, e.g.:

\pdfminorversion=5
\pdfobjcompresslevel=2
\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
Test
\end{document}

AR5/Linux complains:

| There was an error opening this
| document. The file is damaged and
| could not be repaired.

and doesn't show the file.

In theory it is possible to limit object streams to additional
features such as bookmarks, links, anchors. With a traditional
cross ref table the file could still be viewed by AR5,
see PDF specification. But pdfTeX doesn't support this.
And I don't see the point in not having bookmarks, links, ...
Then ghostscript could be used as PDF viewer.

Yours sincerely
  Heiko <oberdiek at uni-freiburg.de>