Newsletter 4: PDF files corrupted when sent by email.

This forum contains a series of Technical Newsletters designed to share with our customers valuable information about implementing or using our products.
Post Reply
Dany
Amyuni Team
Posts: 113
Joined: Wed Sep 11 2002
Location: Montreal.
Contact:

Newsletter 4: PDF files corrupted when sent by email.

Post by Dany »

Some PDF files get corrupted when sent to Hotmail or Yahoo recipients

The problem occurs with small PDF files that consist mostly of text content and some binary data. The receiving application mistakenly treats the file as text and not as binary, hence corrupting the PDF file. The problem can also happen with other attachments or PDF files generated by other products such as Adobe(r) Acrobat(r) and is not related to the way the Amyuni(r) products create PDFs.
For a sample file, please download http://www.amyuni.com/email%20test.pdf and try to send it to a Hotmail account.

Three ways to avoid this problem:
1. Make sure the application sending the email is configured to encode attachments in Base64 or UUENCODE, and do not use MIME encoding.
2. Always use font embedding in the PDF file. This is the default setting for tools such as Distiller(r) or Ghostscript(r) which forces the PDF files to contain much more binary than text data.
3. When possible, use the SMTP email functions that we provide as opposed to MAPI email.

We are currently looking at forcing the default encoding to either Base64 or UUENCODE when sending the files through MAPI.

Amyuni Technologies Inc.
http://www.amyuni.com/forum
Post Reply