Acrobat 7 truncates email address. Acrobat 8 OK

[Shlomo Perets]

Diane,

You wrote:

>Very strange behavior in Acrobat.  Looking for a cause and a cure.
>
>Environment:  WinXP PRo, FM8, Acrobat8 Pro.
>Customer environment: Reader 7 (platform probably XP Pro)
>
>We create our PDFs using Save As PDF in FM8.  Acrobat 8 Pro was installed
>after FM8, so Save as PDF is therefore using the Distiller (Adobe PDF)
>version that is installed with Acrobat.  We set the PDF version to Acrobat
>5.0 or later, to ensure that even customers with older versions of Acrobat
>can open the file.
>
>A few of our customers still have Reader 7 installed, and some are reporting
>an unusual problem with the PDF files.  When viewed with Reader 7, email
>addresses in the PDFs are truncated and the links do not work.  However they
>display correctly and the links work correctly in Acrobat 8.  We cannot
>check, because as you know, we cannot have multiple versions of Acrobat
>installed at the same time.
>
>Have any of you seen this problem, and if so, know what causes it?



Starting with Acrobat and Reader 7, there is a preference of "Automatically 
detect URLs from text" (Edit > Preferences, General; in versions 8 and 9 it 
is called "Create Links from URLs").

When this preference is enabled (default), e-mail and web addresses present 
in the text are interpreted as links when the PDF is displayed (without any 
hypertext links defined in FrameMaker). Acrobat 7.x interpretation of 
e-mail addresses is incorrect -- the presence of a dot, an underscore or a 
hyphen "disturbs" the address and it is truncated (so, for example, 
John.Doe at company.com is interpreted as Doe at company.com).

This was fixed in Acrobat/Reader 8, so if you display the same PDF in 
Acrobat/Reader 8 or 9 the interpreted link will be OK.

To have fully-functional e-mail links in all versions of Reader, I 
recommend adding hypertext links in FrameMaker, so that a "real" e-mail 
links are present in the PDF (and not relying on auto-detected ones).

When longer web links that are split between lines are auto-detected: all 
versions of Acrobat/Reader will only use the portion present in the first 
line (resulting in an incorrect or partial link); having real web links 
(defined in FrameMaker) will fix that too.

[Note: another reason not to rely on auto-detection of web links is that 
some end-users may use non-Adobe PDF viewers, which support various subsets 
of Acrobat/Reader functionality]


Shlomo Perets

MicroType * http://www.microtype.com
FrameMaker/Acrobat training & consulting * FM-to-Acrobat TimeSavers/Assistants


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