What program could have been used to do this pdf file?

[MrYogi]

Text

Thanks

 

[thawolfman]

They could have designed that in something like Word and saved it to PDF~

 

[MrChad]

Potentially Word, but more likely a desktop publishing software package such as Quark (or something less sophisticated like Microsoft Publisher).

 

[Yomicron]

According to the PDF's properties, it was made with Adobe Illustrator 9.0.1

 

[drag]

Well you would make it something like Word or Quark or whatever and then you would export it to a Adobe distiller and that would make the actual PDF.


If it's the fonts that are all f-ked up (hard to tell I am using Win95 right now... everything is f-ked up looking), then that can be likely caused by them using custom fonts. With PDF's you can export fonts with it in someway with the PDF, but if you use custom fonts and don't do that then the viewer tries to substitute something similar and it doesn't always work out.

Or something like that.

Caused by a person who wants to make something realy cool and slick looking but lacks any real publishing experiance. Could be wrong on that part, definately. I don't have much publishing experiance personally besides what I learned in school about typesetting and that sort of thing.

 

[MrYogi]

Thanks

 

[spinningm0nkey]

maybe openoffice

 

[drag]

Originally posted by: spinningm0nkey
maybe openoffice

Umm... maybe not, Troll.

If you'd pay attention to what was actually going on in this thread you'd realise that they already figured out it it was created using Adobe Illustrator 9.0.1

The problem wasn't the program that made the PDF, the problem was the person who made the PDF.

 

[drag]

I figured out what they did.

They purposely dissalowed the program to list fonts. Not sure why, but they didn't want anybody to know what fonts were used to look at the file. On my Linux system it must pick a truetype font by default because it looks fine with gpdf, but when I open it up with acroread (acrobat pdf reader for linux) it looks like crap. Means that the default font for acrobat reader is going to be that nasty looking 300dpi bitmapped fonts.

But thats stupid because if they are encrypted you can still see the fonts types used. The only reason you would set up a PDF like this is if you realy just don't want people to see the fonts you used.

Which means that they are probably using fonts that they don't want to pay for. Lots of fonts are free for limited use, but are very very expensive if you want to publish using them. More then likely they print copies out using fonts, but they just don't want to show it.

Either that or Illustrator's PDF generator just sucks. Which isn't supprising, Illustrator isn't designed for this sort of thing. Adobe Illustrator is designed for making vector graphics, not layout. You want to use something like Quark or InDesign for that.

(I just wanted to see if I was right. At work I don't have the proper tools for dissecting files like I do at home. Plus PDF is the defacto standard for all technical documents (among other types) and is much better then anything else I can think of) (oh BTW I ripped the images and they are here )

 

[Yomicron]

As you said, Illustrator is a vector graphics program, IIRC it doesn't actually put text into its documents rather it puts a picture of each letter. This isn't very effecient, but it makes it easier for customizing for graphics.

Normally documents made in Illustrator are exported as a simple image, so how the text was handled becomes irreleviant. When they made this PDF, each letter became an individual object, not a block of text. This is why there is no fonts listed and why you can't use the text select tool. It's also the reason this one page PDF is nearly 2MB.