Nerdbloke

I maintain a few community websites for free. They are not fancy but I try to make them as accessible and cross-broswer friendly as I can. I provide any documents in PDF format as I consider it a fairly open standard, and works well across all platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac, etc…)

The other day I got a bug report from a user stating that they couldn’t open a particular file, with the PDF reader throwing up an error message “Error reading linearized hint data“.

Good old google to the rescue. Two websites later I’ve found that Adobe PDF reader version 5 and 6 can have issues when reading PDF files that have been ‘optimised for the web’. The solution for the user is uncheck “Allow Fast Web View” in their PDF reading software.

The better solution was for the user to not have to do anything. I could change the way the PDF files were created by disabling the “optimize for the web” when generating the PDF file.

I’ve uploaded the new versions of the files. Hopefully it should all work OK…