[XeTeX] PDF V1.6 too recent

[Philip TAYLOR]

mskala at ansuz.sooke.bc.ca wrote:

>> [PT] Why does my 2011 XeTeX tell me that the PDF version
>> generated by my 2006 Adobe Acrobat Professional is too recent ?
> 
> Because it is?
> 
> I'm not sure what kind of answer you hope to receive.  Your Acrobat
> package is producing a version of the file format that XeTeX doesn't
> support.  Support doesn't magically appear just because a certain number
> of years have passed, and being disappointed about that fact will not
> cause it to stop being true.

Disappointed ?  No, surprised.  It is quite clear from the Wikipedia
entry that XeTeX has undergone considerable development since its
inception in 2004 :

> XeTeX was initially released for Mac OS X only in April 2004 with built-in AAT and Unicode support. In 2005 support for OpenType layout features was first introduced. During BachoTeX 2006 a version for Linux was announced, which was ported to Microsoft Windows by Akira Kakuto a few months later, and finally included into TeX Live 2007 for all major platforms. XeTeX is also shipped with MiKTeX since version 2.7. As of the inclusion in TeX Live, XeTeX supports most macro packages written for LaTeX, OpenType, TrueType and PostScript fonts without any specific setup procedure. Version 0.998 version announced at BachoTeX 2008 supports Unicode normalization via the \XeTeXinputnormalization command.

and it wass therefore a great surprise to discover that it could not
handle a version of PDF that was specified six years ago.  XeTeX is
a PDF-specific engine : it is therefore surely not unreasonable
to ask why it does not / cannot support a version of the PDF specification
that is itself six years old.

Philip Taylor