Hi Clifton,

Just some quick thoughts on your questions.

The (default) version of PDFs that you would be getting from GS distilling is tied more to the version of XPP and to the version of Ghostscript that it includes (and what that version of GS defines as the "default" version of PDFs that it generates), rather than just the calendar year.

The (default) version of PDFs that you would be getting from Acrobat Distiller is tied to the version of and options you are using with Distiller that you have installed - in this case completely separate from the XPP version.

In both cases (GS distilling and Acrobat distilling), the version of PDF that is generated can be changed (from the particular "default") by setting GS distiller or Acrobat Distiller options. So, the answer to your questions is also dependent on whether that is being done or not on your XPP system.

In the PDF Support in XPP manual (xypdf.pdf), see the Providing Arguments to Ghostscript and the Providing Arguments to Acrobat Distiller sections in Chapter 2 Creation of a PDF Document as well as the table of Other Options in Appendix B PDF Creation Options in Ghostscript (specifically the CompatibilityLevel option).

I hope that helps to answer some of your questions.

If you have more questions about a specific version of XPP and the version of GS that it includes and the "default" version of PDFs that are generated by GS distilling, it might be best to contact Customer Support.

Hi, Jonathan.  Thank you for the reply.  I should give some background first.  Another engineering team in my company reached out to me because they want to convert PDFs (from XPP) to XML.  They said their conversion process can differ depending upon the PDF version fed as input and they wanted to know if the PDF versions from XPP over the past few years have changed.  For our part, we are using psfmtdrv with a -distill switch to create the PDFs.  The default is to use Ghostscript and we have no switches affecting the PDF version so I assume there is a default - for us, we are getting 1.7.  Is it possible to say what the default PDF version would be over the past few years if one uses psfmtdrv with no switches to change the PDF version?

Again, the answer is not as dependent on the calendar as it is on the version(s) of XPP and the version(s) of Ghostscript that it contains.

This kind of detail that you are requesting is best handled by opening a Support ticket, so I would suggest that you should do that.