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Home » Newsletter » October 2007

By Raju Sinha

While PDF has seen several versions over the years, full application support for all the version may not be possible. A PDF viewer application built when PDF 1.4 (Adobe® Acrobat® 5.x) was the latest on the market may not render a document based on PDF 1.6 with equal ease.

To provide support for older applications, PDFOne .NET allows you to create PDF documents in several versions - PDF 1.4 (Adobe Acrobat 5.x) , PDF 1.5 (Adobe Acrobat 6.x), and PDF 1.6 (Adobe Acrobat 7.x). This means that you can load a PDF document then upgrade to a newer version or downgrade to an older version - providing both backward and forward compatibility.

In this article, we will see code snippets that illustrate the ease with which you can change the PDF version of a document.

The first code snippet shows how to convert a document from PDF 1.4 to PDF 1.6.

// Create a PDF document object
PDFDocument doc = new PDFDocument();

// Load an old-version PDF document
doc.Load("old_doc_1_4.pdf");

// Specify PDF version for document
doc.Version = PDFVersion.V1_6; // Set to an enumeration value

doc.OpenAfterCreate = true;

// Save the document in a newer version
doc.Save("new_doc_1_6.pdf");

doc.Close();

As you can see, to change the version of a PDF document, you need to load the document and then set the property PDFDocument.Version to a relevant PDFVersion enumeration value. When you call the method PDFDocument.Save(), PDFOne .NET does all the work of creating PDF content that is compatible with the version you have specified.

In the next code snippet, we convert a document from PDF 1.6 to PDF 1.5.

// Create a PDF document object
PDFDocument doc = new PDFDocument();

// Load a new-version PDF document
doc.Load("old_doc_1_6.pdf");

// Specify PDF version for document
doc.Version = PDFVersion.V1_5; // Set to an enumeration value

doc.OpenAfterCreate = true;

// Save the document to a newer version
doc.Save("new_doc_1_5.PDF");

doc.Close();