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Adobe Reader 7.0 Coming to Linux

Sometimes_Rational writes "There is now one less thing for Windows and Mac users to point to when claiming desktop usability superiority. While not officially listed in Adobe's download page, you can get Adobe Reader 7.0 for Linux from the company's FTP server according to this article at The Inquirer , which also has a review. The upshot is that Reader 7.0 for Linux is as bloated as its Windows and Mac siblings, but it loads much faster and is more useable than version 5. I imagine that this will get loads of comments about how Reader for Linux headed downhill after version 4. Or was it 3?"

8 of 454 comments (clear)

  1. Good job, Adobe. by rice_burners_suck · · Score: 3, Interesting
    I think it's about time Adobe starts offering products on Linux... I don't care if this is a bloated peace of junk... I'm using Mac OS X since last year, and there's no problem reading PDFs or PS files there. But Linux is cool for all my server crap, and with more support coming its way, that's fresh and dope.

    Now if only they'll port Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, InDesign, and all their other stuff... In other words, gimme the finger, I want the whole hand.

  2. gpdf rules by dcstimm · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I use gpdf, it loads all pdfs fine for me, and it intergrates nicely into gnome and mozilla, the only thing it has ever rendered incorrectly was that giant PDF from Mozilla.org when they put the ad in the new york times, the names showed up but the background firefox logo did not show up, So I launched it on my mac and preview opened it with no problems except it took 5 times longer than gpdf, hopefully gpdf fixes that small bug. otherwise its been great

  3. Re:xpdf by Chuck+Chunder · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I bought some tickets to a sporting event. XPDF screwed up the barcode on them. Good job I noticed and used Adobe's reader to print them otherwise I (and the three friends I also got tickets for) would have got to the venue and been unable to get through the turnstiles.....

    --
    Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
  4. "Coming to Linux..." by generationxyu · · Score: 4, Interesting
    No, they mean, "Coming to Linux/x86."

    There's a difference. Even Opera (who I hold in high regard for their cross-platformness) doesn't have the latest versions available for all platforms. I understand not updating the BeOS port, but really... OS/2 is on Opera 5? I have professors who still use OS/2 as their primary desktop OS!

    --
    I mod down pyramid schemes in sigs.
  5. Adobe Reader for Linux is also accessible! by peterkorn · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I just returned from the CSUN Conference on Technology and Persons with Disabilities where Pete DeVasto of Adobe was demoing a beta build of Adobe Reader for Linux using the Gnopernicus screen reader. Speech output, Braille output, working navigation of the PDF documents he showed (including forms), all accessible to him on the Sun Opteron box he was using, running the forthcoming edition of Sun's Java Desktop System Release 3 (GNOME 2.6 with GNOME 2.8 accessibility bits). Even as someone very much involved in this work (I'm Sun's Accessibility Architect), it was really cool to see this, and to see the reactions from folks at the conference to what Adobe was showing.

  6. Re:xpdf by drgonzo59 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The better solution is to switch or upgrade professors. I know one professor that would return all the MS Word .doc files back to the sender and ask them to submit in an industry standard format, he never said what those are, we assumed pdf and ps. And it is not because he couldn't view them, he could, he just wanted to "teach us a lesson"

  7. Re:I'll get it now by innosent · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Seriously who worries about that on a reasonably modern desktop?

    Klaus Knopper (Knoppix), or any other Live-CD maintainer, and me (have 50+ Knoppix-based kiosk/office systems to maintain, and like being able to keep the system images under 350MB compressed [current setup is about 320MB compressed, 1.1GB uncompressed, and contains both a kiosk mode and a normal OpenOffice/FireFox/KDE/Evolution mode], plus all of the network and printer drivers from Knoppix). Small but useful components means that a system can be booted from the network and setup with the latest image in 20 minutes. We use Acrobat 4, since it's reasonably current for our uses, loads quickly on older hardware, and keeps the image size down. As I mentioned in another thread, if I can read the splash screen, it's too damn slow.

    --
    --That's the point of being root, you can do anything you want, even if it's stupid.
  8. A Fully Functional Acrobat Suite is Necessary by SA+Stevens · · Score: 3, Interesting

    People who have never used the actual Adobe Acrobat product likely will not understand.

    There are a number of decent and reliable methods to output to a 'PDF-format'. There is only one tool, the Adobe Acrobat Suite, to annotate and augment your PDF files.

    I like to produce tables-of-content, to be able to use an easy graphical method to arrange pages, crop them, etc. I am afforded this ability by the commercal Adobe Acrobat product (which is rather expensive per-seat)

    Adobe should get beyond their 'touch it gingerly' approach to Linux. Release some of your actual tools for Linux, not just a half-baked 'Reader' to look at their output.