Unfortunately Adobe is still the "gold standard." When my client emails the PDF files to one of their clients, there is a greater than 90% chance that they'll try to open them with Adobe Acrobat. In this instance, I found that the output file was actually a postscript file. Somehow the converter portion of PDF995 hadn't installed properly. I downloaded it again and reinstalled and the resulting file was opened with ease. Still, PDF995 is not very flexible--wants to name the output file the same as the .FRX file. That's not very not user-friendly and greatly increases the chance of overwriting something.

Adobe is not one of my favorite vendors--even for Acrobat reader. It's forever trying to update itself, even when I haven't used it in weeks! I've seriously restricted the updater's privileges in my firewall. My son-in-law is a web developer and I was surprised to hear he was speaking to an Adobe user's group tonight. Guess I shouldn't badmouth them too much....

I consider this PDF research somewhat of an exercise in futility, and to make matters worse, I did it about 6 months ago as well. I guess I didn't learn enough the first time--or didn't keep good enough records :-)