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Apologies if this question is a duplicate, but I couldn't find anyone with the same problem as me:

I'm using TexMaker 4.1 to compile .pdf's with the pdflatex command. My operating system is Linux Mint 17 Qiana (I think this might be relevant). I've also just tested a few pdfs and I only encounter problems with posters and presentations made with beamer, not ordinary documents.

I can open all the files I generate with the pdf viewer that came packaged with Mint, called Okular. I can open all the files on my Mac with Preview. So far so good.

Then I have to give a presentation, so I whack my .pdf onto a usb stick and go to open the file on the standard windows machine that's in the seminar room (or any other machine running Adobe Reader). Adobe Reader gives the error "There was a problem reading this document (131)". Then I panic.

I have found a way of fixing the problem (although I don't understand it). I run the following in the command line:

gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -DsAFER -sOutputFile=output.pdf input.pdf

(gs is ghostscript.)

So although there is a way of fixing the problem post hoc, I'd prefer it if the problem didn't exist at all. Does anyone know what's going on? Please ask for any more details that will be relevant to the question.

Thanks.

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In case anyone had the same problem as I did and comes looking at this question, the answer is in the link posted by David Carlisle as a comment. The issue was with the minor version of PDF that was being used by LaTeX. So the issue is fixed by adding

\pdfminorversion=4

at the top of my beamer .tex file (before the \documentclass{} line).

I haven't experimented with other version numbers to see which ones open with Adobe Reader, but 4 works for me.

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