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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.
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.'
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.
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.
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...
Thank god. I was just about to send them an e-mail
Yes, tragedy was definitely averted.
*grin*
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
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 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
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
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!
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).
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"
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'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.
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.
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?