Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Acrobat compatibility problem with PDFExpress


PDFExpress is the online PDF validator tool that check if your PDF file is correctly formatted so that it can be published by IEEE CS and viewed online by IEEExplorer.  The tale is that the error that I got back says "Acrobat version is less than 5.0". The innocent guess was something to do with the compatibility nonsense when I was generating the PDF file. I usually do these:
  • latex file.tex
  • dvipdf file.dvi
and rely on these magic commands to generate anything that could be open by Acrobat. 

PDFExpress offers an alternative with which you can submit your source files and rely on the system to generate the PDF file it likes. Sounds ideal. I tried that and failed miserably: somehow all the figures' captions had gone missing. I must stress that all pictures were included in a properly structured, zipped source file. And don't bother to get the Technical Help from the site, they responded with some incomprehensible instructions that only make you more nervous.  

My solution that works is drawn from this link on creating PDF with ps2pdf. The steps are:
  • latex file.tex
  • dvips file.tex -o file.ps
  • ps2pdf -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dOptimize=true -dEmbedAllFonts=true file.ps
The compatibility levels can be 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4, which correspond to PDF version 3.0, 4.0 and 5.0 respectively. Now submit the the PDF file to PDFExpress, and you will get a nice notification saying that your much-loved paper has passed the check. Hurray! 

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

The second command should actually be

dvips file.dvi -o file.ps

instead of

dvips file.tex -o file.ps

Thanks,
Kamesh

8:48 AM  
Blogger Unknown said...

Thanks. Very useful

4:44 PM  

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