This has turned out to be an enormous issue for me as I sell PDF files as ebooks. I have done a fair amount of investigating this for my system.
My files have to be compatible not just across readers but across operating systems.
To date, I have over 200 PDFs that have functioned flawlessly across Mac, PC (Windows 7 and below), Android, iPhone/iPad, Linux.
I personally test my PDFs using a variety of readers and PDF editors including
- PDF XChange (my favorite)
- Foxit (runner up for me and I recommend for most people)
- Adobe (the bloated monster)
- Nitro 9 (great for moving graphical elements around)
- ABBYY
- And the Nuance PDF Create toolsets
Those are off the top of my head. There are a bunch on Android that I test with too.
I am running the Windows 10 Pro Tech Preview and I have this same problem so I know it isn't fixed yet in any kind of pre-release way (-sigh-)
Here is what I've learned for my situation
The PDFs I created using NUANCE'S PDF CREATE PROFESSIONAL VERSION 8
all fail using the built-in Windows 8/10 PDF reader.
When I look at the PDF properties for these Nuance created files, the underlying engine used to write them is called "ImageToPDF". Using ABBYY it indicates their own engine as does everyone else that I've tried. It is easy for you to check to see
what created your PDF by doing a "Control D" (look at the document properties). Perhaps there's a common engine causing issues.
If I use the exact same source files to create a PDF using any of my other tools I have no issues. I checked the PDF versions made by the tools and they are all set to 1.5.
A customer mentioned being able to convert them in a way they worked by saving them without having to do any kind of extraction, but I have not been able to duplicate that. Perhaps he did a "print" which seems like it could work.
In summary, the workaround everyone is talking about, using an alternate reader, of course works. But not everyone wants to change.
The culprit I have found is my Nuance PDF Creation tools that are using the ImageToPDF engine.
I hope it gets FIXED as I really don't want to have to regenerate all of my PDF files.