David,

Hi - I got clarification from SedTech about why that Commercial2.pdf file wouldn't work... and on other incompatibilities. Thought you might be interested. Here's Sedtech's response provided today (the "bug" they refer to is the problem file commercial2.pdf).

- Larry

SEDTECH Response: "Thank you for reporting this bug. We had a look at the commercial2.pdf document and have found the cause of the problem. I'm happy to report that the bug has been fixed, and this has actually highlighted a few other bugs in the software which we believe are now corrected. The problem was that this file was both "linearized" (for "fast web view" in Acrobat), and it was also encrypted. iSEDQuickPDF was not correctly loading the file if it was both linearized and encrypted. As I mentioned, this has now been corrected.

We expect to be releasing the next version of iSEDQuickPDF by the end of the week.

To answer your question: there are some files that PDF cannot handle. These include files that use LZW compression, and newer files created with Acrobat 6 that use the new compression features.

The issue with LZW files is that Unisys owns a patent on the LZW
compression/decompression algorithm. As far as I know, these patents have expired in most countries, but there is still one patent in force that will only expire later this year. As soon as the patent has expired we will be able to add LZW support to iSEDQuickPDF. There aren't many PDFs that have LZW compression - this was the compression used with Acrobat 2.0, so it's very old. Most newer documents use "Flate" compression which is not limited by any patents.

Files that use the new Acrobat 6 compression cannot presently be read by
iSEDQuickPDF. They cannot be read by Acrobat 5 either, so this isn't such a great problem. We are, however, working to add support for Acrobat 6 compression."



>http://www.nycwasteless.org/bus/pdfs/commercial2.pdf
>I ran GetAnalysisInfo() to check the pdf version, but it returned an empty string. Am I missing something? What's different about this pdf? And how can I test for this difference programmatically?

You can MODI FILE from VFP to take a look if you like, but you may not like what you see. :-)

Acrobat says that this file was created by Acrobat Distiller, version 6.0. There might be some kind of feature in there not supported by the current version of iSED. (I got a message when loading it into the full Acrobat 5.0 that something in the file is not supported by my version of Acrobat.)