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It looks like the Xpdf web page is inconsistent. I got this from the README:

License & Distribution

Xpdf is licensed under the GNU General Pulbic License (GPL), version 2
or 3. This means that you can distribute derivatives of Xpdf under
any of the following:
- GPL v2 only
- GPL v3 only
- GPL v2 or v3

The Xpdf source package includes the text of both GPL versions:
COPYING for GPL v2, COPYING3 for GPL v3.

Please note that Xpdf is NOT licensed under "any later version" of the
GPL, as I have no idea what those versions will look like.

If you are redistributing unmodified copies of Xpdf (or any of the
Xpdf tools) in binary form, you need to include all of the
documentation: README, man pages (or help files), COPYING, and
COPYING3.

If you want to incorporate the Xpdf source code into another program
(or create a modified version of Xpdf), and you are distributing that
program, you have two options: release your program under the GPL (v2
and/or v3), or purchase a commercial Xpdf source license.

If you're interested in commercial licensing, please see the Glyph &
Cog web site:

http://www.glyphandcog.com/

Xpdf is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL), version 2. In my opinion, the GPL is a convoluted, confusing, ambiguous mess. But it's also pervasive, and I'm sick of arguing. And even if it is confusing, the basic idea is good.

In order to cut down on the confusion a little bit, here are some informal clarifications:

If you are redistributing unmodified copies of Xpdf (or any of the Xpdf tools) in binary form, you need to include all of the documentation: README, man pages (or help files), and COPYING. The README file contains a pointer to a web page with the source code, which satisfies the GPL requirement as far as I am concerned. You are, of course, welcome to distribute the source code as well.
If you are incorporating the Xpdf source code into another program, and you are distributing that program, you'll need to release your program under the GPL, which means you'll have to make the full source available. This also applies if you are making changes to the Xpdf tools.

Evince loads large PDF files in less than 3 seconds and uses a comparatively small amount of memory. Scrolling is smooth, as well.

Even evince is starting to suffer from bloat. I've recently gone back to using xpdf on my desktop box, and put ePDFView on my netbook.

xpdf.

xpdf has a utility you can use called pdftotext

• FoxIt
• Xpdf (win32 binaries available)
• Cool PDF Reader
• MuPDF
• Okular (win32 download)

(yes, there's a ton of good PDF freeware available now)

and plug-ins are created by an idiot

I think that you, sir, either haven't seen what populates the web recently. Or you've been dead.

More seriously :

I can count on one hand the number of times I've had a problem with Firefox that would have been solved by it being in its own process.

I can deduce that, apparently, you don't use Adobe's abominable Flash which is a frequent Firefox crasher (thankfully, I don't have to either), nor Adobe's awful Acrobat which can freeze Firefox for several minutes at startup and even more on close (luckily neither do I) nor have a browser which completely freeze for a couple of minutes once a huge download is finished, while an on-demand scanner analyses the file (sadly, sometimes I have to put up with the world-of-worm which is Windows and adding ClamWin seems to be a necessary evil).
Also, you seem to exclusively run a very small amount of very meticulously selected plug-ins, none of which were written "by an idiot".

Your life on the web is probably a very happy one, bar from the occasional blinking GIF that manage to slip through AdBlock+ (which I think count among the few selected plugins that have the privilege to be allowed to run on your browser).

The sad truth is that your situation, although typical for a /. geek, isn't even remotely representative of the random Joe-6-pack netizen "of teh interwebs".

They have to put up with a world of pain composed of constant crashes and slow downs (admittedly, half of which are caused by all the ad-/spy-/mal-wares running because of the random clicking on unknown mail attachment).
And they would definitely benefit from a multi-process browser. (Also, that browser could finally put at good use the quad-core expensive overkill that the random Joe-6-pack user got conned into buying by the store's vendor)

Also don't neglect a significant advantage of a multi-process system (which was humorously pointed in the launch ad) :
- The user will more easily know who's to blame for any instability issue. Because only *that* process will crash while everything else continue to work.

That may help put an end on all these "FireFox is a bloated crash-prone resource hog" trolls.

Have you tried xpdf for windows?

http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/

Or Ghostscript + GSview for Windows?

http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/gsview/

Have you tried using xpdf http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/ to read pdf files?
In everyday use, I find it better than the Adobe Acrobat reader and less incompetent/annoying than kghostview & evince. It's fast to load and use and has a small memory footprint (gnome pun not intended). Also, it can zoom in nicely and do text searches.

Try a different reader like Foxit under Windows or Xpdf or Evince under Linux. Acrobat is getting bloated and slower with every release, but looking at how the folks at Adobe ruined Cool Edit Pro (now Adobe Audition) when they acquired it, that doesn't surprise me at all.

Most PDF documents are tagged by the author to not allow copying. All PDF readers that follow spec must adhere to this (both XPDF and Adobe Reader follow the spec).

From the XPDF web site at http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/cracking.html it clearly states:

The Xpdf package honors these permission settings. Specifically:
  * xpdf will not copy/paste from a PDF file which disallows copying text/graphics
  * xpdf and pdftops will not print (convert to PostScript) a PDF file which disallows printing
  * pdftotext will not convert a PDF file which disallows copying text/graphics
  * pdfimages will not extract images from a PDF file which disallows copying text/graphics

  - raven morris

Your complaints are about the Adobe's PDF reader, not the PDF format itself. MS is only proposing a standard, not presenting a reader.

FWIW, there are plenty of fast non-crappy PDF readers. For example, xpdf and foxit.

Haven't heard of Foxit before, but I suppose I don't use Windows boxes I can control much. Looks like its interface is an Adobe clone, I really hate Acrobat Reader's MDI, particuly the latest version. Still, small and fast is good.

Last I heard Xpdf for Windows was limited to the command-line tools, and that's all I think I can see from the Xpdf website. Is there some other version for Windows, or do they have GUI stuff in the package on that site and lie? (I don't have access to a Windows computer ATM, so I can't see for myself.)

Thanks!

If you're running Windows, there's Foxit Reader. It's a 1.5 MB download, uses less memory, and loads almost instantly. In about 2 years of use, I've only encountered a single PDF that it wouldn't open.

If you're not on Windows, there's xpdf, Evince, kpdf, gv, and probably a dozen others.

Dude, you must be smoking something wierd!

http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/decryption.html

Oh, BTW, pdf encription is crap

xpdf is a collection of some of my favorite PDF utilities & is F/OSS. There are de-drm patches in the wild & some distributions (such as gentoo) allow you to apply them fairly painlessly. For people with X, you can use a viewer. Any platform should be able to use programs which convert the PDF to PostScript (which may then be converted back to an un-DRMed PDF with other software).

I think xPDF is available for Windows for free. It opens in about one second on Linux.

I think the concept itself it good, but Adobe's implementation (which is by far the most widespread) is slow as molassess, up hill, IN THE WINTER.

It's not the PDF format that sucks, it's Acrobat Reader. Use Preview or XPDF.

Complaining about PDFs is like complaining about HTTP cause you don't like IIS.

> Well lout at least cannot generate PDF

True enough. It did when I started using it, but this feature has indeed been removed. I stand corrected.

> And how can you talk about displaying PDF without mentioning Ghostscript

Quite easily, in fact ;-) As far as displaying goes, I'll rather use xpdf or one of its siblings like kpdf/gpdf. The Ghostscript Viewer is good but it has already crashed on me several times on documents I had no problem viewing with xpdf, so I switched. YMMV, of course...

and I'm still in disbelief that there are no alternative readers for Windows given Adobe's piss-poor performance.

http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/

--grendel drago

While acroread 5 is horrible (and the parent therefore deserves the Funny mod), the beta version of acroread 7 is a nice enough GTK app. I still have complaints & it isn't enough to switch me off of xpdf, I no longer cringe when I need some peculiar features from acroread.

Yup. I also find acroread to be slow and bloaty. I am happy with xpdf.

It'd be nice if Adobe ported the full verion of Acrobat over. It doesn't work well in Wine (even in commercial products like Crossover Office) & some of the features for editing/marking up PDFs are useful.

I wish it would search PDFs.

Try pdftotext. Convert .pdf, index the .txt, then delete the .txt

One clue for you.
xpdf

xpdf comes with a utility called pdftotext that dumps the text portion to a plaintext file.

You can get meta information from PDFs with pdfinfo, part of the Xpdf package. There's a Mac OS X binary here. The binary includes a wrapper script to incorporate it into Finder.

"Finding a non-Adobe Acrobat reader that is not itself the result of a violation of an Adobe IP claim [...] is a bit problematic."

No it's not! Adobe has deliberately made PDF a public format; they freely distribute the specs and encourage others to support the format. Finding (e.g.) xpdf is not a bit problematic - there's barely a Linux vendor out there who doesn't ship it. Even The Open Group (the guys who own the UNIX(tm) trademark) have an xpdf page. Getting it to run on your platform might be problematic if you don't run a Unixlike system, but that says more about that platform than about the format.

I second the HTML version. Good old Adobe - popped up a nice little window in the background bugging me to update and stalled the IE process. Since the window went to the background, all I could see was the stalled process, and I killed IE, which, of course, closed all my windows. I hate pdf files..

How is this a fault of PDF files? This is a fault of Adobe's software and perhaps Windows not notifying you about the window Adobe popped up. PDF files work great if you have software that doesn't suck. :)

I'd recommend using pdfinfo, part of the xpdf package. It can extract all of the info that is shown in Acrobat Reader's Document Properties. On *nix you could use find -exec, or on Windows a cmd.exe for /r loop to get all of your PDFs' titles.

Try the alternate Adobe Reader Download Page

All of the software, less of the HTML insanity.

That being said, I prefer XPDF. On many occasions I've found it can open PDFs that Acrobat (even Professional) can't, due to file corruption or strange PDF generation techniques. Highly recommended.

1. pico for quick editing before I've got X up and running.
   
2. NEdit the best programmers' text editor ever!
   
3. fvwm2 a good, fast, customizable window manager (I suffer through twm until this is in place)
   
4. ddd a simply wonderful front-end to gdb.
   
5. mozilla my browser of choice, warts and all (though konquerer is giving me second thoughts)
   
6. xscreensaver nothing makes me happier than xmatrix.
   
7. xpdf simple PDF viewer, no frills.
   
8. ROX-filer a fast and simple file system browser (though I've been leaning towards konquerer for about a year)
   
9. unclutter makes the mouse cursor disappear after several second of inactivity.
   
10. xv in case I need to fiddle with image files.
    
11. xine in case I need to watch a movie.
    

On top of this I have a set of configuration files archived for several of the above programs (i.e. fvwm2 and NEdit) and general system setup (fstab, XFree86, and bash/sh profile).

What makes you think you have to be adobe whore to use pdf documents?

You don't have to OCR PDFs. Just use XPDF.

SN (Side Note): "OCR PDFs" . WTF? OMFG! NITIA!! (Now I'm Thinking In Acronyms!!)

Does this help?

Somebody released an xpdf version which claims to read secure PDF documents, and honours the permissions(meaning no copy/paste,printing etc).

PDF is a proprietory format. Owned by Adobe.

If this is out there, then I can see no reason that MicroSoft can't roll thier own PDF filters, viewers or editors.

Adobe's Acroreader runs fine on my FreeBSD desktop

Why not use xpdf? Much faster to load, and much nicer to use (IMHO) than Adobe. The more recent Acrobat versions seem to be suffering from the "creeping featurism" design bug.

What's wrong with xpdf? or GGV?

Take a look at Xpdf, you even get the source code.

It wasn't always fully open... I've followed xpdf for many years. In the early days, Derek could not show encrypted PDF files because Adobe would not release specs on the encryption . Long ago, xpdf printed a message with contact info for someone at Adobe, saying "contact them and tell them to make good on their claim that PDF is an open format" (or something like that... it's been years). Apparantly there was quite a bit of tension between Adobe and Derek, and people from Adobe claimed (lied) that xpdf could not show those files because Derek was a bad programmer. Finally, Adobe relented and released full specs including the encryption. This probably never would have occured if it weren't for Derek Noonburg and his xpdf program (and Adobe's initial refusal to release a linux version of acrobat reader).

PDF is openly available to be implemented in various systems.
Check out Xpdf. Xpdf is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL), version 2, so that should make many /. readers happy :)

You can download xpdf . In fact, it may already be on
your (linux) system.
it's a nice simple open-source replacement
for acroread.

So use xpdf or some similar PDF reading software. The PDF specification is freely available and there are Free readers for it. You can generate it without having to use Adobe products, and you can read it without having to use Adobe products.

(I honestly don't know if this has been posted yet, but...)

It seems maybe Adobe is just simply noticing things that are already out there. No piracy, just smart minds coupled with fast fingers. Adobe is trying to make a buck. Others do it because they need to (or just want to, whatever. Sortof the same thing IMHO).

Just a thought.

Care to expand on how PDF isn't an open format? It's fully documented by Adobe in the book "PDF Reference" (ISBN: 0201615886 for the current 1.3 version, or 0201758393 for the soon to be released 1.4 version). It's also available online in various places, for example, http://wotsit.org. Furthermore, several independent implementations of PDF encoders and viewers exist, such as xpdf and ghostscript. Yes, many PDFs include LZW compressed data, but that's a problem with Unisys, not Adobe, and there are non-patent-infringing ways of uncompressing the data anyway. Plus, modern PDFs are compressed with the patent-free deflate algorithm. So exactly how more open do you want PDF to be?

I've had Ghostscript gag on PDFs in the past. You probably want to use xpdf.

Check out http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/cracking.html, in which the original author of xpdf explains why he doesn't want to include patches of this sort. He sounds like a very reasonable guy, who respect the principle of copyright. Don't forget that copyright (or left) is an integral part of the GPL as well. If these laws on distribution can be disregarded, there's nothing to stop commercial companies from stealing GPL'ed products left and right. And I don't think anybody wants to see that. I think the patch developer also takes a good angle with his question when he asks if it would be moral/ethical to apply the patch, not whether it would be legal. While the answer to the second question might be "yes", the answer to the former is much clearer, as far as I can tell: yes, it would be hypocritical and unethical to encourage people to break copyright laws. Hmmm... I wonder what RMS would say on this one? Anybody want to ask him? --JRZ

My only gripe is that the statement about pdf. This is a closed,and with-held format.

I agree with you completely! If only that damned Adobe would open the file specification. Obviously they are trying to get a stranglehold on the market and blight out the common man.

We need open programs that can read and create pdf files. Without such programs, the PDF format is useless.

So let's fight the power and boycott Adobe until they free the format!