Adobe Acrobat

Each year we produce a newsletter which we send out to friends and relatives at Christmas. Since we have lived here in Spain, the cost of posting cards with newsletters has risen. So for those people on our email list, we send the newsletter in Adobe Acrobat PDF format attached to an email.

Since the Acrobat reader is free and the PDF format is used widely to distribute all sorts of material over the Internet, I would have thought that most people would have it installed on their computers. However, a number of people, who we sent newsletters to, say they couldn't open it even though I chose to publish in Acrobat 5.0 format to ensure backward capability. Ah well the best laid plans of mice and men.

By the way if you are running Windows Vista, especially if you have installed SP1 (the public evaluation copy), you will need to upgrade Acrobat reader to v8.1 because v7 is not compatible. A quick visit to Adobe's web site will enable you to download this latest version.