What’s new in PDF 1.7
So Adobe has announced Acrobat 8!
With a new Acrobat, of course, always comes the latest revisions to PDF itself. For the first time in a while, Adobe hasn’t really made too many change to the file format. Let’s take a look at the changes…
- MAJOR improvements to 3D!
- Support for 3D (via a new 3D Annot) was added in PDF 1.6 and since Adobe has gotten lots of real-world feedback about what was still missing - so PDF 1.7 addresses many of those limitations.
- Ability to annotate the 3D model
- Control of visual appearance w/o resorting to JavaScript
- Control over animated playback
- Printer Controls!
- Users have been begging Adobe for this feature for as long as I can remember…
- A PDF can now include default print characteristics including paper selection and handling, page range, copies, and scaling
- Portable Collections
- Known in the Acrobat UI as “Packages” and detailed by my colleagues.
- It expands on the existing embedded file mechanism (/Names/EmbeddedFiles) to support a variety of interesting new solutions - while maintaining backwards compatibility with Acrobat 6 & 7.
- Improvement to dimensioning of annotations
- Polyline & Polygon annotations can now have scale & measurement-aware dimensions attached to them
- More Tags for Tagging
- Interactive elements
- Table improvements
- Pagination objects such as headers & footers
- Document Constraints
- These enable a document author to specify certain criteria that must be met in order for the document to be usable in parts of a workflow.
- Signature Constraints - is the signature valid, does it contain certain DN keys, etc.
- Viewer Constraints - does the PDF viewer support and/or have enabled certain features?
- this will help authors of complex document prevent it being loaded by older (or non-compliant) viewers!
And that’s it for PDF 1.7….for now…
November 1st, 2006 at 3:34 pm
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