PDF version 1.7 by default?

[Bruno Voisin]

Munehehiro Yamamoto wrote:

> At least, recent applications, such as Microsoft Word/PowerPoint,
> Apple Keynote, Adobe Illustrator and so on, output PDF 1.6.

Checking here on the Mac (most recent versions for all software, macOS Sequoia, Adobe CC, Microsoft 365, Mathematica 14.1, MATLAB R2024b):

- Adobe Acrobat and Illustrator output PDF 1.6.

- Apple apps (Keynote, Safari, etc.), using the Quartz framework, output PDF 1.4.

- Microsoft Word and PowerPoint output PDF 1.4 when using local (Quartz-based) export, and PDF 1.7 when using online (Microsoft-server-based) export.

- Mathematica, using cairo internally, outputs PDF 1.5.

- MATLAB, using Apache FOP internally, produces PDF 1.4.

So much for standardization!

Updating the PDF output version of TeX apps would be nice, so that for example when including Illustrator-produced PDF figures, you don't have to add

\pdfminorversion=6

to suppress the annoying warnings

pdfTeX warning: /Library/TeX/texbin/pdflatex (file ./Figures/jordancontour.pdf)
: PDF inclusion: found PDF version <1.6>, but at most version <1.5> allowed

etc.

Bruno Voisin