@DanielL: why do you want to convert to a *higher version?!?
Higher versions do have more supported 'features'. These features normally need to be supported+present in the authoring application which created the PDF in the first place. There is hardly a decent way to do it a posteriori.
If you open a PDF in an editor, you'll notice the first line (or one of the first lines, after some "garbage") will contain the string %PDF-1.N (where N in 0..7). Just change N (the 8th byte of the PDF) to the value you want.
This then fakes a new version 'good enough' for most PDF consuming software to believe it... and it will probably be good enough to make some viewers issue a warning saying "This PDF may use features I cannot handle."
Is this what you want?
Here is how you do it:
- Install
perl
(for Windows).
- Run the following command to turn a PDF-1.3 into a faked PDF-1.7:
perl.exe -pi_orig.pdf -e 's/%PDF-1.3/%PDF-1.8/' some.pdf
It will backup some.pdf
as some.pdf_orig.pdf
and your some.pdf
will now fake to be version 1.8.
Run the following command to turn all PDFs in the current directory into faked 1.7-versioned PDFs:
for %i in (*.pdf) do (
perl.exe -pi_orig.pdf -e 's/%PDF-1../%PDF-1.7/' %i
)
Voila! All what you asked for:
- Perl is free
- It's for Windows
- It changes the version number of a batch of PDF files