Thank you for your replies. I reference the earlier reply by jane-e that Adobe is somehow removed from PDF, yet my experience is that Adobe was the premier PDF arbiter of that file format, so I guess I will look well outside the Adobe product line to get to pure PDF creation. The Catch 22 is that third parties use Distiller as an industry standard so whoever controls PDF as proprietary software is still at the mercy of a collection of software that all have intrinsic bugs to the point where they can't talk to each other. PDFs were designed so that anyone, anywhere could open that format at anytime, but I am being told in the previous reply that a newer PDF can't even be read on an old reader. Most technical papers authored on the web must be using backwards compatible software because I can read them just fine on old adobe licensed products. The problem remains this: I want to CREATE pdfs using whatever software is compatible with Adobe so it doesn't create a trainwreck and as you eloquently say: doesn't have anything to do with the dreaded cloud. What I see and experience in computing is a form of economic extortion that software companies exert that marginalizes those who have little to no internet function, and old machines with old software with no option, or inclination to update because if machines are offline they don't need security updates. For a villager in Africa or rural America the problems are the same. Economic marginalization. All want to do is make a PDF at home on a machine that is not connected to Sky Net. If it is this hard, then I will go back to writing with pen and ink. Cheers.
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