The biggest supplier of tickets to any type of show is Ticnet. They’re finally delivering purchased tickets by PDF, which means you can print your own tickets rather than having to seek out a place where you hear “your number doesn’t work” only to have to do their job and point out that “0″ is not “O”.
Or can you?
Yesterday I bought three tickets for Stockholm Ice. Merrily, I went about trying to open the PDF-file. First of all, I use Google Apps, and for once GMail’s built-in PDF-viewer couldn’t open the file, or even display its contents as HTML.
The requirements for reading said file? According to Ticnet, it’s “Adobe Acrobat Reader 4.0 or higher”.
I downloaded the file and stubbornly tried to open it using Foxit PDF Reader v3.1.4. No go. It just said the file was damaged. So, I tried opening it using Sumatra PDF Reader v1.0.1, but the same thing happened. Yes, I then tried to open said file in Adobe Reader v9.3.0 and it also refused, pointing to the same type of error as above.
I tried this on three different Windows XP machines, using two different antivirus solutions altogether; I may also add that I could open a plethora of other PDF-files without any problems, using all three above programs (that are all updated to the latest version).
So, what happened?
On the train I used my Nokia N900 to read my e-mail and decided to try and view the PDF-file, and blimey, it worked – in my mobile phone, that’s running Maemo, a Linux distribution. I used the mobile phone’s built-in PDF reader to save the file and then opened it on my computer.
And it now works.
Seems like Ticnet has a problem on their hands, if I didn’t happen to get a malformed PDF-file, but it doesn’t look like it; all you may need to solve the problem is a Linux-based computer.