Adobe (PDF version 1.7 Extension Level 3) Problems

[Eric Morey]

On Mon, 2011-10-17 at 13:14 -0500, Kipton Moravec wrote:
> The reason I selected Linux is so I do not have to put up with Big
> Corporation's BS.
> 
> Today someone sent me a PDF file in an email. 
> 
> I tried to open it with "Document Viewer" and I get a page that says 
> 
> "For the best experience, open this PDF portfolio in
> Acrobat 9 or Adobe Reader 9, or later."
> 
> It will not let me see the PDF file!
> 
Google search results for "For the best experience, open this PDF
portfolio in Acrobat 9 or Adobe Reader 9, or later." and "PDF portfolio"
turn up some very disconcerting information going back to 2008.

Apparently, Adobe has been pushing the ability to create PDF portfolios
in their latest PDF creation tools. [1][2] Attachments to (within?) PDF
files has been increasingly supported in the PDF standard. But the Adobe
Acrobat 9 tools extend the standardized functionality to create PDF
portfolios that can include many non pdf files including scripts, videos
and flash content. 

It seems that only Adobe software is capable of displaying such
nonstandard portfolios; there are numerous issues reported online for
Mac and Linux users of the latest Adobe Reader displaying such files.
Other pdf readers seem to require that the portfolio documents be
extracted and opened separately. However, the only apparent way to do so
is to use Adobe Acrobat 9 or Adobe Reader 9, or later. ( A nice catch 22
they've provided for non-windows users having trouble with their new
extensions they are encouraging.)  pdftk advertises* the ability to
"Unpack PDF Attachments" but I haven't cared enough yet to test this
functionality on any of the newly popular PDF portfolios.

Anyway, in common use, .pdf no longer implies a single file or document
but could be a container format with multiple attachments and only Adobe
Acrobat 9 or Adobe Reader 9, or later can read the most commonly
used .pdf container format (I believe it is Non-ISO PDF version 1.7
Extension Level 3).

[1]http://acrobatusers.com/forum/pdf-portfolios/what-pdf-portfolio
[2]http://help.adobe.com/en_US/Acrobat/9.0/Standard/WSA2872EA8-9756-4a8c-9F20-8E93D59D91CE.html

* pdftk was not up to the task regarding my last run in with a new Adobe
Acrobat 9 feature, a PDF file that is password protected with 256 AES
encryption. Here is my last communication with the developer of pdftk in
November of 2010: 
> Thanks for the email. I'm afraid that pdftk doesn't support AES 
> encryption. It is on the TODO list, however.
> 
> Regards-
> 
> Sid Steward
> PDF Labs
> 
> Eric Morey wrote:
> > I have a PDF file that is password protected with 256 AES encryption. I
> > have the password, but I am unable to decrypt the file with pdftk. Is
> > decryption of PDF files created with Adobe Acrobat 9 using 256 AES
> > encryption supported in pdftk?