Are there circumstances in which PDFs cannot be opened? My wife has sent an email with an attached PDF to members of her club and several of them have come back to say that they can't open the attachment. They almost certainly have Windows PCs, so am I right in thinking that this could be the problem>
Hi Mike. This is a pretty regular complaint from PC users. Apart from corruption or a malformed .pdf from an eccentric PDF writing app, the most usual cause is out of date software on the PC (or the Mac).
Try this: make sure that the .pdf is made on standard up-to date Apple software, and that the recipients are using standard up-to date PC software (Adobe Acrobat Reader is a free download and like Adobe Flash does need to be kept up to date due to the constant threat of malware).
It is entirely possible that the club members are using older, incompatible, or non-standard software to open these files. "My children gave me this PC when they bought a new one some years ago. It usually works" is a symptom.
I think Euan is correct. I used to have this problem a few years back with documentation I was sending to Windows using guests wanting to book one of my cottages. I logged on my database those who couldn't open a PDF. After a couple of years, I sent them each a test PDF and asked if they could open it. They all could, so I guess they had updated some of their software. I've had no more problems since.
Thanks for confirming my suspicions. I'll draft a polite message for Val to send suggesting that they download the latest compatible version of Adobe Acrobat Reader and warn them that it need regular updating.
Michael Corgan 