What is the difference between PDF 1.3, PDF 1.4,1.5 and the recently released PDF 1.6?
- PDF 1.0 is simply too old – I think PDF 1.3 or 1.4 are the oldest versions that some apps still support. Converting to such an old standard is also difficult: what do you do with all the things present in your PDF files that are not possible within a PDF 1.0 file, such as transparency or current font formats?
- PDF 1.0 is simply too old – I think PDF 1.3 or 1.4 are the oldest versions that some apps still support. Converting to such an old standard is also difficult: what do you do with all the things present in your PDF files that are not possible within a PDF 1.0 file, such as transparency or current font formats?
PDF 1.2 = Acrobat 3.0 – relatively obsolete now PDF 1.3 = Acrobat 4.0 – The first version of PDF which truly had all the needed features to support “press-ready” PDF’s including color managment, ICC profiles etc. It also added javascript, interactive and multimedia capabilities. This standard is probably the safest to send if you are unsure of the capabilities of the receiver of your file. PDF/X-3 and a number of commercial print work flows are based on PDF 1.3. PDF 1.4 = Acrobat 5.0 – Actually, introduced with Illustrator 9, The main difference to concern Scribus users is PDF 1.4, has both transparency and alpha transparency capabilites, which make a major difference in where a PDF with these features can be printed. It takes wither the latest commerical RIP’s or a Level 3 Postscript printer to use these features properly. The latest versions of Ghostscript suport the advanced PDF 1.4 features Scribus can create when exporting PDF. PDF 1.5 = Acrobat 6.0 – The release of PDF 1.5 specs
For example, PDF 1.5 is identified by%PDF–1.5. However, beginning with PDF 1.4, a conforming PDF writer may use the Version entry in the document Catalog to override the version specified in the header. The location of the Catalog within the file is indicated in the Root entry of the file trailer/footer. Acrobat 4.0 (PDF 1.3) Acrobat 5.0 (PDF 1.4) Acrobat 6.0 (PDF 1.5) Acrobat 7.0 (PDF 1.6) and Acrobat X (PDF 1.7) PDFs can be opened with Acrobat 3.0 and Acrobat Reader 3.0 and later. PDFs can be opened with Acrobat 3.0 and Acrobat Reader 3.0 and later. However, features specific to later versions may be lost or not viewable.
Related Questions
Question: How can I convert PDF files from version 1.1 to 1.4 (or higher)? Actually I need some sort of command line tool for batch converting or some API to be able to convert dynamically sever all documents.
Pdf 1.3 Vs 1.4
Answer:PDF 1.1 is forward compatible with PDF 1.4. Everything in PDF 1.1 will work with PDF 1.4 - it's guaranteed by the spec. Let's assume that you've got some justifiable reason why this is not good enough for you (let's assume, for example, that you have a non-spec compliant tool that consumes PDF and explodes on any file version less that 1.4).We can focus on the main syntactic differences between versions. All PDF files have a header somewhere in the first 1024 bytes. In most cases, it's the very first line, but that's not guaranteed (I'm looking at you Ghost Script!). The header looks like this in PDF 1.1: %PDF-1.1 In PDF 1.4,
it looks like this: %PDF-1.4 So in theory, all you need is a tool that will look in the first 1024 bytes for a file for '%PDF-1.1' and change it to '%PDF-1.4'. You could use sed, perl, etc to do something like that for you. You could write it in C and you would be tempted to do something like this:
Pdf 1.3 Vs Pdf 1.4 Free
#define PDFHEADERSIZE 1024
bool ChangeFileToNewPdfVersion(char *file)
{
char *replacePoint = NULL;
FILE *fp = fopen(file, 'rw');
char buf[PDFHEADERSIZE + 1];
buf[PDFHEADERSIZE] = '0';
if (fread(buf, 1, PDFHEADERSIZE, fp) != PDFHEADERSIZE) { fclose(fp); return false; }
fseek(fp, 0, SEEK_SET);
if ((replacePoint = strstr(buf, '%PDF-1.1')) NULL) { fclose(fp); return false; }
replacePoint[7] = '4';
if (fwrite(buf, 1, PDFHEADERSIZE, fp) != PDFHEADERSIZE) { fclose(fp); return false; }
fflush(fp);
fclose(fp);
return;
}
which will work in most sane cases. It will not work if the file starts, for example, with 0 bytes, which would serve as null terminators in the block of data. A better choice (really) would be to cobble up a simple state machine to find %PDF-1. by reading 1 byte at a time until it either finds it or passes 1017 (1024 less the header length), then reads the next byte, if it's a '1', it seeks back a byte and writes a '4'. The only other thing you would need to worry about is that PDF 1.4 suggests that the document catalog should contain a Version key with the file version. Since this is defined as optional in the spec, you are
safe to ignore it. Actually if you feel this is a little complicated, you can use software VeryPDFPDF Editor can help you change PDF version directly through software interface. Please check details from the following snapshot.
If you need to use the command line version, please choose the PDF Editor OCX Control (ActiveX). During the using, if you have any question, please contact us as soon as possible.
.jpg "Convert pdf 1.4 to 1.6")
