Display the document properties in your reader. This will tell you
what
software was used to create the documents.
Alas, none of my readers will tell me anything more than the fact
that the file is a PDF, the file size and the creation date. I
cannot determine what software created the PDF file.
When the document is open in Preview, the Tools > Get Info menu item
will give you the
document properties. It will open a window with three tabs and the
"Details" tab (between
"Summary" and "Keywords") says what application created the PDF, the
creation date, etc.
For what its worth, I think that the "garbled text in PDFs" problem
is likely a missing/corrupted
fonts issue. A PDF document typically will have instructions on
which system fonts to use in
displaying the document and will embed any nonstandard fonts that
they use. One possibility
is that the newer Fairfax county PDFs are using a Windows-only font
that is not embedded and
Preview does not have appropriate substitution rules for. Another
possibility is that there are
appropriate substitution rules, but the needed fonts on your system
have gotten corrupted or
are otherwise unavailable. Apple's Font Book application can show
you what fonts you have,
and has a validation tool (under its File menu) that can find many
common kinds of problems
with a font, in case something got corrupted, and I am sure other
font managers have the
same ability.
While I do have Acrobat Reader on my machines, I usually use Preview
for PDF and Postscript
files, and I don't think I've ever had a problem with it. I went to
the Fairfax County website, did a
search for PDFs and tried opening a number of them, and they all
looked fine in Preview, but that
might be because I am using OS X 10.4.9. I don't believe it,
though. I don't want to sound like I
am playing the "Blame the User" game, but given your comments
regarding bloat, is it possible
you removed some fonts from your system? Or perhaps turned off the
needed fonts with a font
manager?
David Watson
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