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Adobe Releases Acrobat Client for Linux
DanMan writes "Adobe has released a reader client (Adobe Acrobat Reader 7.0) for the linux operating system. No news on open sourcing the client, but they're making a start. You can download the client from their site."
How is this making a start? Acrobat reader 6 didn't count?
I've tried it - it's slower than a retarded kid hopped up on goofballs tired to a tree.
37Mb RPM?! I think i'll just stick with gpdf...
For the impatent:
e nu/
ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/reader/unix/7x/7.0/
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
The front page five minutes ago should have read: "The next Slashdot story was ready two weeks ago, and subscribers can kick themselves for giving us their money!"
No news on open sourcing the client, but they're making a start
What the hell? So is every commercial company out there just supposed to release everything as open source? Good grief Charlie Brown...why would they do that?
There are plenty of Open Source options for reading pdf's. There's no reason to expect/demand that a commercial software company should open source their products. I mean, come on people...enough is enough.
I downloaded, installed and ran it a couple of hours ago. I expect it to be done loading real soon now.
Pdfs are Unfit for human consumption
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
PDF format is open and there are a number of open source viewers for Linux. I don't think it's that important that Adobe open source their reader or even port it at all. This is just one extra option, no big news for us.
Oh, come on, give 'em a break.
/.'ers totally forgot it.
It's been almost a whole three weeks since that earth-shattering story... I'm sure most
Besides, as one TV network exec once said, defending reruns, something to the effect of "If you didn't see it first time, it's new to you!!"
The difference is it is now officially announced while previously someone 'discovered' it on their site. Adobe couldve claimed it was a test, beta product and not given any support for it at all. Now Adobe must stand behind the product it has made, and linux users can now say another big official app has joined their platform of choice.
Now if only Adobe would bring Photoshop over as well...
http://www.livejournal.com/users/metricmusic
Christian Marillat has made available unofficial Debian packages of Acrobat 7 since a few weeks now. On sarge or sid, add the following to /etc/apt/sources.list:
Then it's as easy as apt-get update; apt-get install acroread mozilla-acroread. This gives you the core functionality and Web browser plugin. (Incidentally, there are a bunch of other useful unofficial debs there, including mplayer and lame.)
You can also install the Javascript plugin and a whole bunch of other Acrobat plugins with apt-get install acroread-plugins. However, be aware that some plugins may report back to the mother ship: LWN article. Also, they will eat another 43 MB of disk space.
- Kevin B. McCarty
Be sure to read this article before you install the reader.
The software contains functionality that could cause serious privacy concerns - it is possible to include a tracking mechanism in PDF's, readers that this great 'feature' will then contact some website and keep track of how many people read that document.
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
The PDF format is open. You can print to PDF off every platform and office suite except Office on Windows.
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
The full PDF specification is available for free download from Adobe's web site. It's in PDF format, so in the worst case you would need to use their (free beer. Mmm. Free beer...) software to print it, but there is nothing stopping you from writing your own software to create or display PDFs. By doing this, they have helped make PDF a common standard, and associated the name Adobe with PDF. I work with PDFs a lot - I read and review material in PDF format, create PDF documents from LaTeX including images and diagrams saved as PDFs, and I don't use a single Adobe product.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Reverse engineer pdf? I thought you could download the spec of the pdf format from Adobe's site. They also publish the spec of the tiff format, and are behind the new digital negative format that is an effort to replace proprietory digital camera RAW formats with an open format.
Closed programs, open formats is, to my mind, a reasonable compromise for a commercial organisation.
Sigs are so 1990s. No way would I be seen dead with one.
I know this is Slashdot and all. But if people expect that everytime a company releases a product for Linux that they MUST OpenSource it or they have "only made a start" then there will never be a market for Linux.
So if Adobe released Photoshop for Linux should they OpenSource it? Are Oracle "only making a start" by supporting Linux because they don't Open Source their database ?
Wake up people. This is good news that people consider Linux a platform worth supporting. This isn't the "start" this is the game.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
You wear wraparound sunglasses, even indoors. You wish your mother would let you ride a motorbike. You tell your friends you're pulling in $50,000 a year and $2,000 a month "playing the stock market" but in reality you're only bringing in half that and your dividends from MSFT havn't been good in years. Your non computing friends all turn to you for help; you only charge $30 an hour. Your collegues talk about you behind your back. Your workplace nickname is likely to be "The Asshole". Unlike the Linux fanboys, you actually try to pick up dates in bars but women laugh at you.
You think you're so cool you hurt. You have mirrors on every wall in your "loft apartment", which is really a grimy little apartment next to a guy who plays Guns 'n Roses at 3am. All of your furniture is from Ikea. You sometimes think that changing your name to "Steve" would be "pretty cool". When you go to bars you only drink Miller Lite. No body ever asks you for help with their computers because they know you don't know anything but OS X, even if you do tell them you "run Unix" now. Your friends openly laugh at you.
You regularly give $10 bills to homeless guys because you have too much money. Computers baffle you, but you enjoy looking at pictures of naked women. You don't know what Linux is, but you continually bugged the IT guy at work about your computer so he installed Linspire on your machine.
You shop at GAP. You probably used to use a Mac. When you saw the multiracial image used as a desktop picture and heard that this operating system came from the same country as Nelson Mandela, you knew it was for you. You meet with your friends in fair-trade coffee houses and talk about the eventual overthrow of evil corporations such as Microsoft and Starbucks. Like the Linspire user, you have very little real knowlege when it comes to computers but you would never use your computer to look at pictures of women degrading themselves.
You've been "into computers" for ohh, one or two years now and fancy yourself as "a bit of a hacker". Wouldn't know C from C++, or even Perl for that matter. Older Gentoy users may be building their homes from matchsticks. You've explained to all your friends that your matchstick house will have an "optimised floorplan". They've tried to tell you that your house violates every known building code and law in your area, but you've ignored them so far because you can't read those complicated regulatory documents.
Much like the Gentoy user but you'd also be into sadomasochistic sex if you could get it. You're not just building a house from matchsticks, you're planing to grow the trees to make the matchsticks. You've cleared some land but don't know what to do next because you havn't read the books you've got, so you've posted to alt.arborists.newbie asking for help. It's been three days so far and no one has replied. You remain hopeful.
Nice try, you miserable cut&paste clod.
For the record, your post is basically a complete rip of this post by El Cubano with a couple of lines stacked in front of it. Moderators, please act accordingly.
I do not think behavior such as yours should be encouraged. Actually, I hope you'll reincarnate into some exotic frog, SCO techie, or worse.
Karma cannot be described by words alone.
Now if only Adobe would bring Photoshop over as well...
Well lets start with Acrobat writter, first. Porting Reader 7 is not a glowing support for Linux it is just a way to make sure PDFs stay in common usage. With Acrobat Reader 5 Getting very out of date and not as compatible as it was before. They need to give an update to the "Little OSs". It is just a way for them to go Yea almost any modern computer can read PDFs v7 and incorage companies to upgrade to Writer 7. This is not Adobee going HEY WE LOVE LINUX! it is more Ug I guess we need to throw Linux a bone here just so we can sell new versions of the writter.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
the same happened when nero released a version for linux. rather than being appreciated for at last acknowledging the existence of linux, they were shunted for not being 'open' enough, and their product denounced inferior to the free alternative (k3b v nero).
don't moan that companies aren't trying to provide for linux users, if when they do release a product, you write bad reviews of it and criticise their attempts to get closer to a userbase they know little about, and can even fear.
Many people are missing the big picture with Adobe Acrobat. (I freelance graphics) When I send a client a preview of the artwork, I use a combination of XMP, hand-built watermark by myself, and the security of Adobe PDF files. I can choose if someone is allowed to print or not, and I can restrict all modifications to it. So with all three security elements in place, I'm able to manage and control my work, without having to worry about them taking it and not paying.
If you've used the program, you'll note that it's extremely complete in terms of interface. Hardly an effort worth taking for just one free app on platforms where a simple display of the .pdf would suffice for most people. I wouldn't count the possibility of future Adobe products for Linux out just yet. They did a great deal of the underlying interface structure--arguably the hardest common ground between programs; they'd be insane not to reuse it.
For those like me who just cannot stand that brightly colored distraction at the top of the app:
Drag any toolbar button on the line with the flashy advertisement down about half its height. This will make a new bar with only that button on it.
Next, drag the rest of the buttons down to the new bar.
Once the last button is moved to the new bar, the old one (and the flashy ad with it!) will disappear and your new ad-less toolbar will move up to replace it.
Locking the toolbars here will prevent it from returning the next time you start the app.
I've been using v7 for about a month (unofficial "beta" version). It works fine with my scroll wheel and is done mostly in GTK+2.
This is actually a very useable PDF viewer. I've never been fully comfortable in Acroread 5, XPDF or GSview, and I don't like the pile of dependencies on GPDF and KPDF.
For me, Acroread 7 is the way to go. It'd be nice if it was open, but sometimes we just don't have that luxury...
Well, actually, in this case, yes. Acrobat Reader is just that: a READER. It's doesn't hurt them to release it. In fact, it would bolster sales of their actual product: Acrobat. But more importantly, it's supposed to be a cross-platform format, and if they want to support that, they need to make an open, cross-platform reader.
Linux is more than just Linux/x86 on one or two distros, and open source is the easiest way to provide products for all of Linux. So they still have a long way to go before they've even done what this article suggests: releasing a Linux version of Reader.
I know that most slashdotters live in their own la-la land where everything is ascii and png but for real people in the real world who want to do work on a Linux workstation, Adobe's reader is a brilliant solution to a real problem.
Also, might I remind you that postscript is an Adobe technology.
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.