What the title says. I know PDFs exported from Google Docs are version 1.4, but which versions does it support when viewing PDFs?
I'm asking because I'm having problems with PDFs generated with the PHP TCPDF library, which uses the latest version of the PDF standard (1.7). Namely, when viewed in Google Docs, these PDFs are missing some text – sometimes all bold or italic text, sometimes all regular text while bold and italic render fine.
For instance, take a look at the following PDF:
https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B-zxKExddZ1-S1M0NHhVQWExZms
The first row should say "freesans regular", but the text is missing (or actually is rendered in white and thus invisible). Other PDF programs like Adobe Reader and Foxit Reader show the text correctly.
Also, compare with this PDF:
https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B-zxKExddZ1-SVI1aDU0V2c4Vmc
It's the same content, only saved with Word 2007, which uses PDF version 1.5. All text renders correctly, which leads me to believe that perhaps Google Docs doesn't support the latest PDF standards. Anyone know if that's the case?
Best Answer
There is no mention of the supported version number on either the Google Docs Viewer tool page or the View files in Google Docs page from Docs Help.
I don't know if it is possible to give a complete answer to your question but my best guess is that there is not any officially supported version, but rather that the team tries to keep the tool as up-to-date as possible and to support as many features of the latest version of PDF as possible.
Since the viewer is provided as a web service, Google doesn't necessarily have to think about supported versions in the traditional way. They may be closely monitoring usage and as they receive error reports during rendering of documents from the web service, they may be working to resolve those problems so that the percentage of successful views is as high as possible. After all, in my experience there have always been vendors who "supported" a particular version of PDF but which did not successfully render particular documents due to bugs in the rendering engine - but the existence of bugs didn't change the officially supported version number.