That is true, but I have never encountered a PDF that is not produced by me and cannot be faithfully represented in third party PDF readers. And I give up the idea of producing those kinds of PDFs because I know the people I send to will complain about me rather than their PDF readers. So, Adobe Acrobat doesn't have any monopoly power here, since almost no one cares about those things only they can do.
We often get PDF's that does not work in our pipeline and it's always blamed on the pipeline, not on the creating software. The user usually converts the PDF to an image with adobe reader and screenshot, load up Libreoffice, paste and export it as PDF archive.
So the PDF that does not work in your pipeline is created by LibreOffice rather than Adobe Acrobat? That doesn't seem to add any strength to the argument that "Adobe Acrobat has unusual powers because only it can handle the full spec of PDF".
No, you missread. The PDF that works is created by anything that does not use the full spec of new PDF versions. We have chosen Libreoffice because we already use it for other things. If we recreate the PDF in Libreoffice as PDF archive version it works just fine. The problem is usually a pamphlet created by some ad agency using the absolutely latest version of some layout program, neither adobe nor libreoffice. The PDF usually works just fine in Adobe but not in our pipeline that uses all sorts of linux programs to process into a JPG in the format and orientation our system needs. Noone has had the time or energy to fix it since most stuff works so for now it will be downsampled by a screenshot and just showed into the system. The added benefit is the PDF shrinks from 150 MB to 300 kB in the process.
Adobe Acrobat is the only thing that can handle all cases yes. All other programs uses (different) special cases each and most of them fail in some edge cases. It can be funny letters showing up because of fonts not working properly or images disapearing or all sorts of things. I have given up to fix them all. I still have a library of PDF's that we used to run through to try to get as many as possible to work.
