Do you PDF at ver 3 or ver 4?

Subject: Do you PDF at ver 3 or ver 4?
From: KMcLauchlan -at- chrysalis-its -dot- com
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Mon, 4 Dec 2000 10:22:17 -0500

G'day all.

Can anybody see any justification for creating PDFs
at version 3, still? For a while, after Acrobat 4
became available, it made sense to continute distributing
PDFs in version 3 format, cuz a lot of people hadn't
acquired the new reader.

I went along with that, because -- having been in the
situation -- I don't want to be at a customer site,
or having technical difficulties at some public ceremony,
only to find that the documentation is in a format
that requires me to connect and download a reader (and

I don't want to put some poor tech in that position either).

But, at this late date (Acrobat 4 has been out for quite
a while now) I think that people who are hanging onto
version 3 of the reader are just lazy and I've stopped
catering to them -- though not without taking some flack.
Does anybody have an alternate point of view?

Do we have any kind of rule-of-thumb for how long,
after release of a new Acrobat Reader, a new Netscape
or IE, etc., we should wait before publishing docs or
web-stuff (or whatever) that takes advantage of new
features and formats?

Whaddya all think? How long do we coddle the reluctant?

I can see waiting as long as it takes, if (say) nifty
new features of a browser were offset by new security
problems that prompted corporations to forbid its use.
But if the problem seems to be just user inertia...?

/kevin

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