Keys Corner

The German Post and their parcel service, DHL, have a great internet service – you can print your own stamps online (Just don’t try to use the internet address printed on the stamps – it doesn’t exist! It seems to have been a temporary glitch – the address is online now) or print out pre-paid address labels for packages. Both services produce PDF documents which you can print out at home.

Unfortunately, neither service works properly with Adobe Acrobat or Adobe Acrobat Reader on the Mac. Which is strange, given that Adobe is the mother of the PDF format. The stamps get printed with a red background – see the example on the left in the photo above. How it should look is shown on the right of the same picture.

The results of printing an address label are even worse- the whole label is printed in mirror writing. The first time that happened, I scanned the unfortunate label and flipped it in Photoshop to get it the right way round. I didn’t want to waste the postage.

I have found in the mean time, that only Adobe’s products have these problems. If I open the files with, for example, Skim (freeware), everything works just fine!