Wisdom of the PDF Sage

Adobe has posted a version of the ISO 32000-1 document on its web site and it is freely available.

Adobe has an agreement with ISO that it can post the standard for free provided it isn’t the “official” ISO version. So the running headings and footings have been changed and the introductory pages are different, but the technical chapters are identical including page and section numbering.

If you need an official version please pay for it at the ISO site. This is one source of income for this important standards organization.

A friend of mine from various PDF conferences wrote me to ask me the following question:

Enclosed is a file that looks great, but the text can’t be searched (or copied).  Is there a tool that can automatically detect that all/most of  the text in a PDF file can be searched (or not)?

I wrote - OF COURSE - Acrobat 9’s Preflight!

With one of the many new checks that we’ve added to Acrobat 9 Preflight, you can easily detect whether any text in a PDF can not be properly encoded as Unicode (aka can be extracted/searched properly).

I’ve built just such a profile and have uploaded it here!   Just download the file, then double-click it to install it into Preflight and it will appear in your "Quick Checks" section.