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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?"
For instance, my Bank Statements have been coming in password protected files for years now. So I very much welcome this new product.
Linux users can endure the eternal system lag that is .pdf
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all
I prefer xpdf because it loads much faster, and you can hit the 'r'eload button when you update your document. It's quite useful when you're working with LaTeX.
The "only" drawback I see is that sometimes when reading certain articles I get some really ugly, pixelated fonts.
I suppose there might be a fix around for that? Anyone?
A message from the system administrator: 'I've upped my priority. Now up yours.'
Lack of useful features, it has been a while since I used it but I know the most annoying part of it was I couldn't actually select text to copy, it had a highlighting tool, but that didn't do anything useful.
For the impatent:
e nu/
ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/reader/unix/7x/7.0/
Since I work with many people who *still* have not switched to Open Office, I tend to export my OO files into PDF. At least I preserve my formatting much better than if I save as MS Office formats [filtering is better in OO 2.x I'm told].
PDF is also useful for sending read-only stuff like contracts or proposals - if you're the consultant types.
Now that Adobe updated Acrobat, maybe some of the more recent PDFs will be more renderable in Linux.
"You're gonna need a bigger boat." - Chief Brody
Faster .. I generally take a shower after I start the adobe reader. When I come back after dinner it has checked all the plugins. Then I go to sleep and by morning it has opened all the pages. It is not slow if you ask me.
Thank god. I was just about to send them an e-mail, I get encrypted PDFs all the time, and I don't like having to bust out my laptop or VMWare. Glad they finally got with the pogram
Believe me, we most certainly don't point to Acrobat Reader when pointing out "desktop superiority".
In fact, I'd say it's pretty much the other way around!
Nice to see that Adobe is putting some effort into Linux and I'm sure the Adobe reader provides things open source readers don't yet support. Namely I think there is currently no OS reader that supports filling out forms.
That said, for all my needs, the new OS pdf readers are good enough. They used to suck (kpdf and gpdf were a joke and xpdf was simply ugly), but the new kpdf is simply awesome and the same goes for evince.
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.
Acroread renders better than xpdf, and has much better document navigation features to boot.
Yes, xpdf is somewhat faster (although acroread7 feels faster to me than crappy old 5.x).
Good thing everyone can have both!
Anyone had it crash yet? Acroread 5.0.1 thru 5.0.6 (or so) crashed regularly for me...
I mostly use gv or gpdf because they're fast and simple for most PDFs. I have to admit, though, that it's nice to have an updated viewer for when I need to do things like deal with forms or some of the other esoteric functions of PDF.
Derek
Don't Panic...
One really cool thing about the 7.0 version of Adobe Readers is that they can be extended with Adobe LiveCycle Reader Extensions to add features that are normally only available when you buy Adobe Acrobat. Of course, Reader Extensions costs something. But what's great is that given the right "pixie dust", Linux is no longer a platform for just viewing PDFs, but it can do PDF Collaboration and forms routing just like its Windows and Macintosh counterparts.
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
keanmarine.com
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
That's a feature...
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
What's wrong with xpdf? I am sure it loads a heck of a lot faster.
Adobe's reader is more compatible and (at least for me) loads just as fast as xpdf. I was actually surprised it loaded so fast, though it's not compatible with SELinux - you need to change the context on the *.api plugin files and the ADMPlugin.apl file using "chcon -t shlib_t file_to_change_context" before you can run the reader.
I've been using this for several days under slackware, and I must say I'm impressed. It loads quickly enough (though not as fast as xpdf), but it fits right into my desktop as far as widgets go, and the rendering looks great! The printing support also work fine with the KDE system (you just tell it to print to "kprinter"), and so far I haven't experienced the weird orientation issues I sometimes get with landscape-oriented documents printing improperly.
As far as installation goes, I just used rpm2tgz to convert the downloaded rpm into a slackpack then used installpkg. I had to create a symlink to the executable, which was /usr/local/Adobe/Acrobat7.0/bin/acroread.
My biggest gripe so far is the annoying, but thankfully small, banner add in the top right corner advertising random Adobe services, but it's not *too* intrusive. Here is a screenshot.
Or you could use a PDF/PS viewer that's nicely integrated with your desktop, and has a sane feature-set and good usability. On GNOME we've got Evince, and on KDE there's KPDF. Evince (and now KPDF, I believe) is backed by the Freedesktop.org Poppler library (which is in turn backed by Cairo which can use hardware acceleration for faster PDF rendering). Kristian (as referenced earlier today on slashdot re: wobbly windows) is hard at work on adding nice features needed for desktop apps. Poppler is a fork from the Xpdf rendering code (with the maintainer's blessing, since he was using his own rendering infrastructure and didn't want to mix two backends into Xpdf).
We've been doing a lot of experimenting with making the "core features" of Evince better for on-screen reading, rather than working on the sort of extra packed in features in Acrobat. For example, when you press page down, evince will slightly darken the area on the screen where your page was as it smooth scrolls. That lets your eye track its position much easier, so once the scroll is over you just keep reading without a visual "seek". KPDF is cool too, so either way you swing you've got a good choice.
Acroread 7.0 is using GTK+ for its widgets, but this hardly makes it have a native "feel". Use it for a minute and its pretty clear its a cross-platform app port.
Try kpdf 0.4 (one that comes with KDE 3.4)? This is what a pdf viewer should look like. 1. Type ahead search. 2. Easy copy-paste. With acrobat reader it is not possible to select/copy a paragraph in 2 column format document, but with kpdf one can easily do that. 3. Can watch for changes in the viewed file and update the view accordingly. 4. Presentation mode. 5. KDE app. Native look and feel. Can use kio_slaves. 6. No bloat. Open source.
You still can't read each and every PDF document with xpdf, especially DRM protected files are impossible to view...
You also can't fill out fillable PDFs with anything except acroread
So far I've had problems printing most PDF's to an HP LJ4Si printer, but when I upgraded to 7, those problems went away. Yes, I confirmed that running xpdf or acroread 5 again still showed the same problems (blinking light showing job in printer, stops blinking after several seconds, no typical startup sounds).
FWIW, YMMV.
on windows as well, you just need to go in the installation directory, then in the Plugins subdirectory and remove EVERYTHING BUT these 3 files (just move them somewhere else so you can put them back if you have a problem)
EWH32.api
Search5.api
Search.api
after I did that and disabled the splash screen Acrobat reader 7 loads up nearly instantaneously on XP. I'm not taking credit for this, I found this tip somewhere I can't quite remember right now and it surely works!
-- the cake is a lie
You can select text to copy. Drag over the text and it works exactly like any other X11 application -- middle-click to paste.
This has been on the front page of http://www.fedoraforum.org/FedoraForum.org[FedoraF orum.org] for a while now. Kinda late news, as I've been using it for a while now.
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.
I generally take a shower after I start the adobe reader.
Man, you need a new computer! I can't even finish a coffee while the thing starts!
No, 3 takes it, remember when the splash screen for startup just flashed up for a split second, not even long enough to read "Adobe"? On your 486? I still don't get the point in adding "features" to a product if it means that 99.9% of the things you do with the product take twice as long.
--That's the point of being root, you can do anything you want, even if it's stupid.
I could deal with the bloat if the damn thing is more stable than Acrobat 5. It is one of the only closed-source desktop apps I use regularly in running my business. (The only reason I use it over xpdf or gpdf is because Acrobat allows me to print multiple copies of documents, where gpdf/xpdf do not! Does nobody print multiple copies of PDFs but me?)
It also happens to be the one app that routinely destroys the desktop. I often have to ssh into the desktop boxes because Acrobat has seized all input and won't let go. My employees frequently abandon virtual desktops because the Acrobat splash screen won't go away and they don't know how to kill it. (Have to show them how to use xkill I guess).
Acrobat 5 doesn't integrate well with the Linux desktop. It has a rude habit of grabbing keyboard input at unexpected times -- I have trouble switching virtual desktops using certain window managers because Acrobat always receives the F1 key, not the window manager.
The Acrobat 5 Firefox plugin is nasty -- if you drag your mouse pointer into the main window while the Acrobat plugin is running, it seizes all keyboard input; you can't even type anything into the location bar until you drag the mouse pointer back up to the Firefox menu bar.
While writing this message I launched Acrobat Reader 5 to remind myself of what the problems were, and within two minutes it locked up and I had to kill the beast by remotely logging in from another computer.
So if Acrobat 7 solves any of these problems, I'll probably use it gladly, bloat and all. Come on, Adobe! I swear that if you wrote quality Linux desktop apps, people would use them. They might even *pay for them* (ahem, Photoshop... ahem, Illustrator).
AFAIK it is 32 bit, but if you have 32-compat libraries installed, it will just run in 32 bit mode automatically.
This is unlike flash, since it does not have its own process, it needs that the parent application (firefox) runs in 32-bit mode as well.
However, if you are really desparate for a 32 bit system, but have a 64 bit system, you should set up a 32-bit chroot. It wastes disk space -- but can be highly useful.
badness 10000
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.
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"
You can't even print multiple copies of a document using xpdf/gpdf.
I don't know about gpdf (don't use it), but in xpdf, when you hit the print button, in the "Print with command box", just add a '-#' (without quotes) followed by the number of copies you want. It is a standard option to the lpr command and CUPS obeys it as well.
http://www.eff.org/IP/DMCA/US_v_Elcomsoft/us_v_skl yarov_faq.html
this is the same Adobe that went after Dmitri Sklyarov.
what has changed in their org, board of directors, corporate mindset that should convince me to ever forgive them?
Yep - I didn't think so.
Lets have a little contest as to how large of objects we can shove up the collective rectum of Adobe.
-me
how do I get my original account back when @home died long ago?
Please... you can't even scroll across pages with the direction keys in xpdf! its a page reader, not a document reader
I don't want to read
Try it first, compare it with xpdf, and choose what suits your need - just dont' discard it offhand, because it is a Good Thing >)
I'd trade in a feature I never use for the speed of kpdf. Acrobat reader is bloated and slow.
I've decided that linux users are in large a hard to please bunch :) . . .
Seriously though, we should be glad that the acrobat reader has been updated. This is one area that is still fairly essential for a corporate desktop. Corporate types wanna know silly things like why do I use something called xpdf and my colleagues at xyz company have the newest adobe. As a computer person, you can smile at this behavior - however, many of you realize discussions such as this is what continues to marginalize Linux from gaining marketshare.
Corporate entities should be thanked for releasing software to Linux. They DO NOT PROFIT from it at this point by and large. I'm sure someone can pull up a random example to the contrary. However, by and large there is little profit. Those companies that choose to support linux in whatever fashion probably do so at the behest of some visionary individuals within the corporate ranks that see fit to expend corporate resources on the project - again not because of profit - but because of future potential of one.
That's right, imho companies are placing small wagers on Linux - and we, the OSS community need to make these wagers pay off eventually by concentrating on increasing our numbers. When that happens - the wagers placed by companies will be larger and larger - and eventually we will get things we've always wanted for Linux.
Don't beat up or be overly critical of corporate efforts. Please remember if you've got a favorite OSS solution to a product that a corporate entity is trying to offer a solution for, then that is the best of both worlds - not an attack on yours.
I was using Apple's Preview for a while to view contracts, but I never saw certain deadlines - I kept emailing people asking about them, and one day I got the reply that they're where there are supposed to be in the PDF: look again. Whatdayaknow!? Preview didn't display certain form data, AND didn't alert the user that it wasn't displaying it either. Group-based markups frequently get ignored in "alternative" PDF viewers too.
So sure, if all you're reading in PDF are static data sheets and what are essentially "print files," this really isn't big news, but if you actually use PDF files to work with big companies ino order to earn a living, this is great news!
Gentoo users have been able to install Adobe Reader 7.0 for two weeks now. (Though the firefox plugin didn't work properly until a week ago.)Loads fast, looks okay (GTK), and most importantly CLOSES WITH ONLY ONE MOUSE CLICK.
On the 17th of the month, somebody in our department posted the following message:
So, it's been out for a while, even publicly
My Linux - (L)ove (I)s (N)ever (U)tterly eXPensive
Im sure we will have plenty of people harp on about how XPDF is faster(which it is) or how the adobe reader is not compact , or how it has more bloat than a whale. The fact still remains that it renders PDFs excelently and it is another product for the linux world .
,. .
OSS is about freedom and our right to choose what we run.
Every port to linux or BSD or one of the other alternat Operating systems is a major victory for freedom of choise. As much as i respect RMS and his iron stance on GNU everything , i have to disagree and say we also need to allow people to decide how they want there product licensed.
with Adobe finaly updating the antiquated reader , its just one more sign linux is gaining a stronger foothold in the desktop market, Now i may really dislike windows though i dont want to see it vanish , i want to see all products having an equal(or near enough) market share
Let us hope we soon see photoshop on linux , the gimp is cool but right now linux really needs a program in that class with a little more omph
Its the freedom to decide if you want to run comercial or OSS
And the freedom to decide if you want to sacrafice a bit of HDD space and RAM space for frankly better PDF rendering(right now atleast , the xpdf team are doing a great job)
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
jumping on the bandwagon...If linux would fail on the desktop he would forget Linux, but since Linux desktop is getting to be a viable alternative, they just can't afford to miss it. They sure don't want to lose the future's market so as good capitalists even they sleep with M$ or Apple today they will choose to sleep with Linux if need be... Sorry about the rant but that's my opinion about Adobe's "commitment" to Linux. And I think it is good, there are more choices and I hope that gpdf and open source alternatives will get to the same level and less bloat in the next years.
Why would you want to work at Adobe?
1. I need the money.
2. They called me in.
3. I still need the money.
Otherwise, go figure.
After reading about this in the Gentoo Weekly Newsletter on Monday, I emerged acroread 7, and it works like a charm. It's a definite improvement over version 5.
I think he takes a shower because Adobe Reader makes him feel so dirty. xpdf is much cleaner - hense, no shower.
Just installed it, and it works fine. Scrolling with the weel also, same in fileselection boxes.
Bart
Just tried 7.0 and it works a way faster than 5.0.
I didn't like 5.0 because it used to crash during search process.
7.0 seems to be much more stable too.
/ss
Please reconsider. A mind is a terrible thing to waste. And that 'CS' department is obviously simply an IT department, not a real CS department. They aren't going to teach you anything you want to know.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Acrobat Reader 7 is required to do your taxes in the Netherlands (for buisinesses, private persons can still use paper). So now at least we can do our taxes on Linux. I welcom Acrobat 7!
This is your sig. There are thousands more, but this one is yours.
Now all the Linux users can enjoy the annoying aspects of up to date Adobe products.
It's a pre-release version that's not yet intended for the public, though it's not marked as beta or pre-release. According to http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/57616 (german) it's been put online for a customer in the netherlands. The final version can be expected around mid 2005. The acrobat files mentioned on heise.de and this /. article are the same, so i guess the real final will still take some time.
The more support the better, especially from mainstream vendors like Adobe. Of course, I would really like to see Photoshop, Illustrator and others come to Linux (and therefore, *BSD through Linux emulation at the least). Adobe gains customers, the open source community gets more applications and more people can migrate away from Windows without excuses. Sure there's GIMP, but some people don't want to learn an entirely new application if they don't have to.
shop.envescent.com - Computer hardware and more.
You can fill out pdfs with flpsed. flpsed allows you add text to pdfs.
On another note xpdf is many times faster for small pdfs than acroread. However, if you zoom in on a big pdf (like a map) w/ xpdf it renders the whole thing to X as an image. If that image is bigger than your memory (regardless of the screen size), X swaps out and your machine is reduced to a crawl. Acroread, on the other hand, doesn't do that. It just renders the part of the screen that is visible, which is slower than keeping your image in memory, but much faster than reading swapped contents from disk.
And what's the problem w/ all of you? I just downloaded Reader 7 at 200kKB/s from adobe. Where's the slashdot effect?
I have to agree here - our sales department all uses Fedora Core 3 via thin client terminals, and we tried acroread, xpdf, and ggv for PDF files. Our users need to be able to open, print, and email PDF files everyday. Not all of these PDF files are formatted ideally, eg, the person who created the PDF just scanned the whole image in as an image, and not text, hence you get these 3-5 mb files.
XPDF - works reasonably fast for small PDF files, but was choking several times a day. At best it would only clog up the print queues, at worst it would eat up ALL my cpu cycles and bring the server to a crawl.
GGV - hardly worth mentioning. Opened less files than XPDF.
acroread - ugly GUI, but only crashes or stops print queue once a day. WAY better performance than either xpdf or ggv.
I for one welcome our new PDF-reading overlords. Can't wait to install 7.0, hopefully will give better performance than the old version.
The reader extensions? They work great, used em for the past 3 years.
We looked into including that feature in forms we use in house, but the cost is insane. Something around 10 per form.
Mod point free since 2001
People keep forgetting that Linux is not x86-only. It runs on lots of other platforms (probably ppc/ppc64 is the second most popular.)
So this isn't going to help me (nor will it help Linus!)
Actually it is quite fast. Compared to f.e.:
/opt/acrobat7 /opt/acrobat7
xpdf - acroread is much faster (rendering) and xpdf is ugly as hell and almost not usable (try printing something with this ancient shit)...
ggv/kpdf and other ghostscript based - they are fine for postscript but fail much to more times on PDF files, they simply do not open all PDF files that disqualifies them for me...
acroread 5 - version 7 is faster and more usable...
So actually Acrobat Reader 7.0 for Linux is the best choice, and as for bloat (in size) I installed it via tarball, deleted loads of shit - all plugins - I don't need them. I just need acroread to display and print PDF files, nothing more. Also I deleted some help/sample files. Compressed acroread binary with upx and what I get is:
% du -hs
36M
Not so bad at all... Given that acroread loads almost instantly on my machine (and my machine is not a rocket certainly), renders fast and Just-Works.
Very good job Adobe...
But it has some bug. I hope they will iron them out (yes I've submitted them to their beta program bug tracking database).
I mainly work on Linux and prepare documents with LaTeX. However a very useful feature would be to edit a PDF (and not by opening the PDF in Vim!).
This would be a great help when collaborating with others who don't use LaTeX. Even the ability to simply add annotations to a certain peice of text would be extremely useful.
Does anybody know of anything that can do this under Linux?
It's been in portage testing for some time, and I definitely will keep using it. Not only do you have the peace of mind that it will render your PDF correctly, but the GTK2 GUI looks far better than xpdf or acroread5, and the loading times aren't too bad at all. I haven't even had to remove the useless plugins.
One qualm - I had to delete one plugin file to stop an error message coming up on start (It was invalid or something).
I submitted this last week, with a funnier headline!
.pdf that it did not render correctly, but it unfortunately will not render pure postscript.
Actually, they did have it on their official download page for about a day, and I just happened to be checking. When I went to show a friend, however, I found it was no longer there, and the download pointed you to the version 5. Luckily, I was able to find the URL in my download history, and found that they didn't actually remove the file from the server -- only the link.
The program is actually quite smooth, and is very well-integrated. They seem to have done a great deal of work on the interface, and I'd be surprised if this didn't forshadow some future Adobe interest in Linux. It seems like an excessive amount of effort for one freely-available program -- accessibility features, a very good help system, etc. I was especially impressed by the implementation of the "Find" feature.
The rendering is spotless, clean, and fast, and Adobe's "CoolType" font rendering libraries are also provided. I've not found a
All in all, though, I must admit that I was quite impressed. I hope to see more Adobe interest in Linux in the future -- it would be a very nice seal of approval for the system as a whole to finally see, say, Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, or Premiere natively for Linux.
Very cool!
P.S. If it's still the same version I downloaded, you can rid yourself of that annoying flashing advertisement bar thingy by dragging all the toolbar buttons down to a new toolbar...when you move the last one down, it removes the now-empty (except for the flashy Adobe ad thingy) original bar and you're left with an identical bar where you moved the button, without the annoying advertisement, helpfully moved back to its "original" position when the default one is removed. Lock 'em there, and you're good to go, even after closing and re-opening the program!
See,
QT is a great multi-plataform toolkit... it can render beautifully under Windows or MacOSX, witch are the main target plattaforms for Adobe.
It would make a lot of sense to Adobe port their core applications to a toolkit that can compile on all their target plattaforms, plus Linux!
Hey, its happening!! We already have Acrobat Reader and PhotoShop Album made using QT.
Plus, if Adobe could be untied from both Windows and MacOSX, their products would become a LOT more acessible... A dedicated Linux box running Photoshop + Illustrator would be a great solution for a lot of graphic houses out there!
Now, if the XOrg guys could fix the XImput system, so my Wacom tablet would get configured automagicaly via hotplug without having to manualy edit the config files... wow, that would be perfect!!
---- You know how some doctors have the Messiah complex - they need to save the world? You've got the "Rubik's" complex
Acrobat Reader has steadily become more and more obese to the point where xpdf is now my default PDF viewer. I'm no big fan of xpdf, but it beats waiting around for Acrobat Reader to load code I will never need.
but why!? can someone from Adobe please tell me why we need this?
Trim back your plugins. For the most part you only need the following:
EWH32.api, printme.api, Search.api
Make a backup of the plugin directory (folder, whatever)
X:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 6.0\Reader\plug_ins
And then delete all exept the three mentioned above from the original plugin dir (folder, whatever)
Should load MUCH faster.
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.
I do this, too. Then you just use ps2pdf and, viola, you've got a filled out pdf!
Thanks for the tip, but for god's sake, if you're gonna use french words at least get them right, it's: VOILA.
viola means raped.
Here we go again!
Adobe is more concerned with Acrobat Reader working correctly than they are with bloat. Acrobat has become THE file standard in the printing industry. (We used to receive Quark or Illustrator files, along with a bunch of photos, text files, and fonts - now all we need is a properly distilled .pdf.) And believe me, there are plenty of people out there who are very picky about the tiniest matters in their printed pieces. Since customers are often getting their proofs over email or the web in the form of .pdf, it's critical that these files display exactly right. You can lose tens of thousands of dollars if your press outputs something even slightly different than what the customer signs off on proof out.
And the programs that graphic designers are using now are far more complex, giving the designers more to work with and letting them work faster. Of particular interest are layers and transparency - something even Quark has begun to see the light on. These graphic files have to work as designed when they're dropped into Acrobat Distiller, or you're going to have the same problem - customer's proof is different from the printed piece.
I would imagine that Adobe develops Acrobat Reader and Acrobat side by side, so it's not a matter of separate development teams and of not worrying about the program they don't make money on. Adobe has far too much at stake to put out poor versions of the free Reader.
Don't get me wrong. I'm very excited about Adobe Reader 7.0 on Linux. I love that it uses GTK, starts quickly and looks really good. Unfortunately, however, the printing still sucks as it doesn't support cups. I can't go and select the printer I want to use from a drop down. I personally can manage without this but I know a number of non-technical people that hate not having this.
Then in the Print dialog box, change the "print command" from "lp" to "gtklp." Bingo! A friendly, usable, and full-featured Print dialog box that does everything you'd ever want in CUPS.
It works for Opera too...