"Not to point any fingers here; I seriously doubt the fault lies with our esteemed editor"

Whether it's PDFs from PC Pro's editor, Outlook messages or his partner's photos, space is at a premium for Steve this month

- STEVE CASSIDY

Every month, without fail, the editor of this magazine sends me a preview of my column. It's a stunningly accurate preview, because it’s the pixel-perfect final imaging of the pages. If I don’t spot any bloopers, the next thing that happens is that the file gets fed into a gargantuan printing press and turned into many thousands of physical paper pages.

We've been doing this whole check’n’send routine since for almost two decades, so none of this is newsworthy in itself. What interested me last month was that the size of the PDF had jumped up massively. Years of 3MB files, handled without further comment, suddenly replaced by a 13MB PDF.

Not to point any fingers here; I seriously doubt the fault lies with our esteemed editor, possibly the most skilled and experienced PDF wrangler I've ever met. My suspicions face towards the invisible, consent-free process of software update now being thought of as just what the customer always wanted: some setting within Acrobat has been flipped as part of the update, leaving the output files at the default, ultra-scale resolution preferred by printing press operators.

There's a certain kind of computing enthusiast who would treat this crisis as an opportunity for a bit of search engine flexing. Right enough, there are probably hundreds of different third-party PDF apps out there. Some of them look better than the standard Adobe PDF Reader, others make a fuss about operating solely in the cloud.

I regret to say that the sheer variety of these utilities puts me off all of them. I simply lack the management time necessary to apply a professional usability filter to all those competing utilities.