Well from my understanding its all about poppler, the library behind evince, okular, xpdf et cetera. And from what I remember when talking with some of the devs is that it might never reach compliance with ISO 32000 (PDF 1.7).
That is surprising. We might learn more about the best way to handle this if we understood why they think so. I'd expect them to be strongly motivated to push from 99% to 100%.
Maybe there is some special obstacle that is very hard to handle. Could you ask them for details?
I am not sure whether poppler supports any of the older versions completely, and since they are not very common, I would rather advertise 90% compliance with PDF 1.7 than 99% compliance with PDF 1.2.
I won't argue against that.
> 1. A page that says "Here's how to inwtall a free PDF reader." This > is what people should link to when they link to a PDF file. I think > that should be the main page of the pdfreaders.org site.
Thats the way it is right now, see http://pdfreaders.org
If that's the purpose of this page, the first paragraph should be replaced. This page should not discuss versions of PDF. It should not say what is good or bad about PDF (in particular, no need to call it an "open standard". For a person who wants to install a PDF player, that is a confusing distracton
Just say, "If you want to read a PDF file, you don't have to install Adobe's proprietary software that doesn't give you freedom. Here's how to install a free program to read that PDF file."
The information in the first paragraph belongs in http://fsfe.org/campaigns/pdfreaders/pdfreaders.en.html. It is relevant there. In pdfreaders.org it only adds unnecessary complexity, which in this page we really want to avoid.
Offering a long list of PDF readers is also unnecessary complexity. I suggest you make the simplest recommendations you can. Recommend just one player for each platform. Make it simple to do what we ask people to do.
The full list could come after, as a sort of appendix.