Seventeenth edition again

[Andy Wade]

For wiring regs fans:

The draft for public comment of BS 7671:2008 is now available as a free download, with strings attached, from

strings attached are:

1. You must have Acrobat/Reader 7 or greater to read this file.
2. To open this file for the first time, you must be connected to the Web, (/sic./)
3. You may subsequently open the file "offline" for a period of 30 days. It will not work after the DPC close date - 28 February 2007.
4. You are not permitted to give this file to anyone else, nor distribute it via the Web, an intranet or in any other way.
5. You may direct others to the IET web site where they can obtain the file for themselves.
6. Printed copies (£50) may be obtained from the IET web site, or 01438 767 328 or [e-mail]
7. You must only send comments to the IEE on the official form, details are given below:

Now, does anyone know whether installing Acrobat Reader 7 or 8 will screw-up my existing installation of (full) Acrobat 5.0?

[JohnDW]

Not quite what your are asking, but I have Acrobat Reader V5 and Adobe reader V8 installed and running independently. Since the full Acrobat V5 is a different program, providing you make sure it is being installed in a different folder, it should be OK.

Just to be sure, set an XP recovery point before doing the install

[John Rumm]

When you find out, let me know ;-)

(chances are it will reassign you file associations to point at the new reader - you could manually point them back of course)

If in doubt:

had a play with that the other night - seemed to work rather well, just install, and run it to create a virtual machine. Then start the virtual machine and install an os and software of choice. It is nicely isolated in its own sandbox, and you can clone machines by simply copying their hard files. Quite a nice way to experiment with software without any risk to your stable platform. I have two WinXP MCEs and a SuSE Linux running in parallel in their own windows now.

[Andy Wade]

I was hoping you'd be the one to tell me... :~)

That's probably the easy bit. Altering the interaction between Acrobat/Reader and Firefox is another area of potential grief, IME...

Of course another approach might be to find a "utility" that would "convert" this PDF to one easier to read, if you follow my drift.

Interesting. Does it gobble all your resources and grind exceeding slowly, though?

[Sparks]

This document can be printed.

You can print to a PDF from any application that can print, using "PDF995" which is free!

[Sparks]

My Bad, doesn't seem to work!

However, if you have "Microsoft Office Document Image Writer" installed, you can print to that ok! (and them create a PDF from that using PDF995 if you wish)

Sparks...

[Ian White]

It certainly screwed up my full read/write Acrobat v4, as it would fight with the later versions over file associations, and possibly other file version and registration issues too.

One solution is to install v4 on a separate machine that doesn't do much pdf reading, and run it across the network when you want to edit a file.

Thank you very much for keeping us informed about development on the

17th edition.

[Archie]

So how big is yours??

Mine went from 4.3MB(original) to 43MB (MS Doc image) to 496MB(Cute PDF)

Archie

[Timothy Murphy]

I wonder why "they" added that requirement. One would imagine this would be a fairly standard PDF file. Maybe there is a song in the middle?

[Archie]

Just guessing but it may be because its a time expired document.

Archie

[Andy Burns]

Welcome to the brave new world of Digital Rights Management :-(

[Andy Dingley]

They're using 7's usage tracking and DRM features.

It's hard to tell just what they're tracking here, but it certainly "phones home" to log who is reading it (by IP address) and probably causes a time expiry in February.

I have no major problems running Acrobat 7, but then this is a big and modern PC. However the DRM stuff is as badly coded as most Acrobat products are and usually causes me problems by busying out the network connection until I kill it manually. As I've got gigabit ethernet to my desktop, that takes quite a bit of doing...

[Huge]

[Makes mental note to stop using Acrobat]

Open Office writes pdf files quite adequately. Guess I'll have to find a reader.

[Andy Wade]

Some new meaning of the word "welcome" of which [etc.] ...

Seriously though, what are they trying to protect? All serious users are going to have to buy the final printed copy in any case. Changes between this and the final version are inevitable, and (AIUI) this DPC version does not contain the definitions section, nor an index.

[stevelup]

Foxit Reader is good, fast, free and small... It won't help you open this particular document though which is encrypted using Adobe's DRM.

Steve

[cynic]

OK lets cut to the chase. Has anyone got a precis of the alterations from the 16th edition?

[Huge]

Although the chances of it running on a non-Windows, non-Intel computer are quite small. :o)

Do Adobe still do their free pdf -> text service for blind people?

[Sparks]

I left it in MS .mdi format, I didn't see the point in converting it back to PDF.

Sparks...

[Andy Wade]

See previous threads here and the IEE summary at

one being an unrestricted PDF).

[Colin Wilson]

Foxit might be immune to this crap (its an alternative pdf reader)