[milhous]

after creating a PDF of a webpage in panther, I transfer the PDF to my Windows box where according to acrobat reader 7, the PDF was produced using version 1.3 of the PDF standard which also references in parenthesis that it's based on Acrobat 4.x.

Well, there have been 3 iterations of Acrobat since then. So what gives?

let the discussion begin. And for some odd reason, I am having some trouble printing quartz-generated PDF's to my laserjet, it'll print a a few pages then the printer suddenly stops printing with an amber light appearing for some sort of error. but that's a discussion for another thread.

[Millennium]

There have been three iterations of Acrobat, but not three iterations of the PDF standard.

PDF 1.4, which was first introduced in Illustrator 9 (and later Acrobat 5), introduced three new features. One was transparency, which Apple already had. The other two -setting the print quality to lower resolutions and new encryption capabilities- don't really apply to a screen drawing model. So despite the version number, Quartz has everything from PDF 1.4 which matters.

PDF 1.5 is the latest version, introduced with Acrobat 6. Once again there are three new feature, only one of which matters to a screen drawing model like Quartz. The other two are extra compression techniques and improvements to tagged PDF, neither of which really applies. The third feature -layers- is the one thing from this that OSX still doesn't support. Then again, the usefulness of layers to a screen drawing system -where you can get the same functionality and more by using multiple drawing contexts, something well beyond the ken of a file format- is arguable at best.

End result: Quartz isn't really behind. Given that, it may be better in the long run to stick to a better-known and better-implemented version of the standard, when you don't really need (or already have) the features from later versions.

[MPMoriarty]

Didn't I hear that Tiger is upgrading Quartz to a newer version of the PDF standard?

[P]

Perhaps. In that case I hope Apple gives us the option to keep making the old PDFs, since not everyone has the latest viewer installed and PDF 1.4 is more than enough in most cases.

[Angus_D]

Also note that Quartz will use the oldest version of PDF that it is possible to render the content in - I think it supports some PDF 1.4 features for example but will mark the file as version 1.3 unless you use stuff which isn't in the 1.3 spec.

At least I think I read that on some mailing list once