Can I recommend you try out VirtualBox, I use it daily and it's a really useful (and completely free bit of software). Ubuntu is probably a good distribution to just get up and use quickly.


I'll be surprised if there aren't any PDF validation tools. How about this one?

If not, Google throws up loads of others.

I'm quite happy to test out any other PDFs you throw at me, with KPDF or KGhostView, if you need it.

Sam.

Oh, I have a license for Parallels (actually, two licenses since I bought one because I wanted the software then got another as part of one of those MacBundle-type offers). I had Ubuntu set up a while ago and was very impressed, but wasn't using it enough to justify the disk space.

Obviously you've found one and therefore done better than I did, but I really should have qualified that as "there doesn't seem to be any free PDF validation software". In my defence, the first two pages of Google results are links to commercial products from companies like 3-Heights, LuraDocument and SilverWind. Adding "free" to my search just seems to get me a lot of forum posts querying the existence of free validation tools and not getting helpful replies, and some of those useless catalogue websites that just throw together any old rubbish content they think will look good to Google and surround it in adverts.

Hopefully with a validator at my disposal, the next ones will be perfect. I'm a very optimistic person!

I've never done any PDF stuff before so forgive me if this completely idiotic, but it sounds like you have a Mac. Is there perhaps a way you can use their Cocoa libraries to create some PDF content and then compare it to yours?

Please see the attached (zipped) PDF file for my latest progress. Having checked out the PDF validator linked and performed a more thorough internet search, I've been able to check this file much more thoroughly than the one before. Sadly those validators are very literal in their interpretation of the word; both of them returned 'invalid' for the previous PDF with no further exposition. Now they both return 'valid', so that's nice. What I was really hoping for was the PDF equivalent of the W3C HTML validator, but I guess you can't have everything.

Oh, the Mac is very PDF-oriented, but I'm using some relatively obscure parts of the PDF file format (specifically, Postscript Type 3 fonts) that it won't be (since it doesn't ship with any Type 3 fonts, given that no-one's created a standalone Type 3 font in probably 20 years). If you download the attached PDF then you'll probably notice that it draws very slowly indeed. That's because of the encoding method I'm using; it should improve dramatically in future versions. File size is also due for a sizeable reduction.

Sadly this file caused a crash for me. However it does actually display before crashing, which is an improvement on the previous file.

I am using Adobe Acrobat Reader 9.0 on Windows XP Home.

EDIT: I've looked some more, and it crashes the reader the first time it loads, but afterwards it will display. I suspect there's a memory handling problem with the Acrobat Reader, rather than a problem with your .pdf.

Works like a charm with both KPDF or KGhostView. The latter draws very slowly as you say, but KPDF is actually pretty nippy.

Sam.

That PDF some are having problems with... XP x64 and Acrobat Reader 6 (and 6gb memory) - displays perfectly.


Newer isn't always better