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Works on Winders, Linux, OS X, *BSD, even Solaris. Build yourself an AT every night .BAT file that checks 'em all. It might even be able to repair the corrupted ones.

I've never used Acrobat, so I wouldn't know what to suggest. Depending on your needs, e.g. pdftk may fit the bill. Generally it's better to look at the features you need and then search for a tool based on that, rather than looking for a 1:1 replacement for a particular application.

"If PDF is electronic paper, then pdftk is an electronic staple-remover, hole-punch, binder, secret-decoder-ring, and X-Ray-glasses."

http://www.accesspdf.com/pdftk/

PDF TK written for the PDF Hacks book. It's not exactly for the common user, but it does allow you do quite a bit with PDFs that you're not supposed to be able to do.

Wow... I guess I lost out in the moderator lottery today! My poor attempt at humour may have fallen flat but it was certainly not meant as a troll.

I was kidding, okay? Obviously, PDF is a good choice for a document like that when they want page-level formatting and such, and when the new format described is not ubiquitous or implemented yet. (Parent was meant as a joke about bootstrapping a new format.) PDF is open and is great with the right tools -- Preview and the "Save as PDF" buttons in OS X rock! (Though I've done the same thing for years in Windows, using a generic PS printer driver, the save to file button in the print dialog box and ps2pdf -- OS X just makes it far more convenient.) And between open tools like Ghostscript, pdftk, pdflatex, Scribus and anything else that produces PS or PDF directly, it's possible to do quite a bit. I've also found it wonderful for archiving interesting papers and other documents useful to my research.

> I'll hand it to PDF for being pretty good, even if the software to use PDF (read AND write) is very expensive

On what planet, exactly, is writing PDFs expensive ? I manage to do this for free all the time with a variety of software packages. I thought everyone else did the same. If not, well, I'm glad to have possibly helped you cut your PDF production expenses ;-)

> I believe a browser should be smart enough to withstand whatever's thrown at it, and if it recieves errored data, to notify the user as such, and move on

Most browsers, when they receive erroneous[*] data, are perfectly able to "withstand" it (actually, they just ignore whatever tags or parameters they can't understand). I suppose you're talking about not rendering the page if it has bugs ? Well, you *can* force a browser to do that (Gecko will do it if you send an application/xhtml+xml MIME type header), but you cannot generalize this beahviour, for the following reasons : (1) the *vast* majority of Web pages out there are invalid (*cough*Slashdot*cough*), and (2) even those who are valid can be rendered invalid by external factors (ad banner code, for instance). And you cannot fail to render much of the Web, at least, if you want to have users, because without a large userbase, you won't be able to push for more standards support (yes, it's quite ironic, I know).

> it is also our fault for not implementing all of the features

It would probably help if the standard was a tad less obscure. Of course, you've a lot of conformance tests out there, but still...

> As Microsoft does have more of the market share, that shouldn't stop people from creating pages that don't work with Internet Explorer

Huh... Yeah, sure. Whatever. I'm sure my customers would be thrilled at the opportunity to break their site for ~80% of their visitors, don't you think so ? Seriously, that's not (yet) possible, the best people can do is make standards-compliant pages that work on most browsers (note I didn't even say "all browsers" because there are differences in CSS rendering between nearly every one of them. *Sigh*).

> If it was anyone's "fault" [...] it's the Web Developers for not using the standards

What about the funny people at Netscape who started the nonstandard tag mania in the first place ? The W3C for not being vocal enough ? I only heard about Web standards fairly recently (a few years). That campaign should have been launched much earlier, *before* the damage (i.e. gazillions of invalid pages all over the Web) was done !

[*] Yes, I'm a grammar Nazi, too. You're out of luck, today *grin*

Pdftk has an updated site located at accesspdf.com. There you will find an OS X installer, too.

From the site:

If PDF is electronic paper, then pdftk is an electronic staple-remover, hole-punch, binder, secret-decoder-ring, and X-Ray-glasses. Pdftk is a command-line tool for doing everyday things with PDF documents. Keep one in the top drawer of your desktop and use it to:

• Merge PDF Documents
• Split PDF Pages into a New Document
• Decrypt Input as Necessary (Password Required)
• Encrypt Output as Desired
• Fill PDF Forms with FDF Data and/or Flatten Forms
• Apply a Background Watermark
• Report on PDF Metrics such as Metadata, Bookmarks, and Page Labels
• Update PDF Metadata
• Attach Files to PDF Pages or the PDF Document
• Unpack PDF Attachments
• Burst a PDF Document into Single Pages
• Uncompress and Re-Compress Page Streams
• Repair Corrupted PDF (Where Possible)

Pdftk allows you to manipulate PDF easily and freely. It does not require Acrobat, and it runs on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD and Solaris.

PDF tool kit (pdftk), by Sid Steward, author of PDF Hacks (O'Reilly), at http://www.accesspdf.com/pdftk/

PDF merge/split/repair/etc. GPL, multi-platform.