@DanielL: why do you want to convert to a *higher version?!?
Higher versions do have more supported 'features'. These features normally need to be supported+present in the authoring application which created the PDF in the first place. There is hardly a decent way to do it a posteriori.
If you open a PDF in an editor, you'll notice the first line (or one of the first lines, after some "garbage") will contain the string %PDF-1.N (where N in 0..7). Just change N (the 8th byte of the PDF) to the value you want.
This then fakes a new version 'good enough' for most PDF consuming software to believe it... and it will probably be good enough to make some viewers issue a warning saying "This PDF may use features I cannot handle."
Is this what you want?
Here is how you do it:
- Install
perl
(for Windows).
- Run the following command to turn a PDF-1.3 into a faked PDF-1.7:
perl.exe -pi_orig.pdf -e 's/%PDF-1.3/%PDF-1.8/' some.pdf
It will backup some.pdf
as some.pdf_orig.pdf
and your some.pdf
will now fake to be version 1.8.
Run the following command to turn all PDFs in the current directory into faked 1.7-versioned PDFs:
for %i in (*.pdf) do (
perl.exe -pi_orig.pdf -e 's/%PDF-1../%PDF-1.7/' %i
)
Voila! All what you asked for:
- Perl is free
- It's for Windows
- It changes the version number of a batch of PDF files
Thanks! It does appear to only be able to change the version up to 1.5 though. Is there any way to convert to higher versions? (1.6, 1.7) – DanielGibbs – 2010-09-28T21:27:58.553