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• Posted Oct. 4, 2012, 9:06 a.m. - 11 years, 6 months ago

Illinois Attorney General Uses PDFs Extensively and Offers Help

Lisa Madigan is the Illinois Attorney General.  According to the Illinois Attorney General web site, AG Madigan is trusted with protecting the “public interest of the state and its people.”

 

 

As an example, consumer complaint forms are offered as PDFs.  Three separate versions are published: a Consumer Complaint Form, a Consumer Complaint Form with Larger Text Size and a Consumer Complaint Form en Español. Other publications include FAQ’s for Consumers and a Final Judgment and Consent Decree.

In addition to protecting all of the consumers in the state, Lisa Madigan has another important task of heading up the PDF Protection Bureau.  OK, I admit there is no such state department, but AG Madigan is helping her consumer base by assisting them with problems in opening their PDF files.

Evidently the People of Illinois (and people all across the USA) occasionally have problems opening up PDF files.  Combine this with the vast amount of forms and notices that are made available to the public in PDF form, one can see that the state needs to provide assistance.

While they could refer their people to this blog (as we have great, up-to-date articles dealing with PDF problems), the Attorney General office of The Prairie State has decided to provide their own help posting.

First on their list is to check the version of your Adobe Reader software by clicking on Help and then selecting About from the drop-down menu.  The funny thing is they recommend updating your Adobe Acrobat if the version is lower than v4!

The current version is 10.1.4!  The Illinois CIO needs to hop onto his employees and get their web site up to date!  Do you think they are using Acrobat 4.o to generate their PDF files?  If so, no wonder people are having trouble!

They also recommend checking the version of your browser and updating your Internet Explorer or Netscape browsers if they are lower than version 4.  Internet Explorer is sitting at version 9.  Netscape Navigator was very popular in the 1990’s, has decreased in popularity quite a bit, but is still available with version 9.0.0.6.  They do not mention Firefox at all whose version is sitting at v15.0.1.

One thing they recommend (that is surprisingly not out of date) is to try saving the problem PDF first and then opening it up from your hard drive rather than through the browser.

Browse the Illinois Attorney General’s help page Help Opening PDF Files for more fun tips.  Better yet, go to the Iceni Technology Blog to get up-to-date help with your PDF files.

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