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FSFE Launches Free PDF Readers Campaign
FSFE Fellow writes "The Fellowship of the Free Software Foundation Europe is proud to announce its latest initiative: pdfreaders.org, a site providing information about PDF with links to Free Software PDF readers for all major operating systems. FSFE president Georg Greve says: 'Interoperability, competition and choice are primary benefits of Open Standards that translate into vendor-independence and better value for money for customers. Although many versions of PDF offer all these benefits for formatted text and documents, files in PDF formats typically come with information that users need to use a specific product. pdfreaders.org provides an alternative to highlight the strengths of PDF as an Open Standard.'"
...so is the Free PDF readers campaign over now?
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Other proprietary alternatives to Adobe's PDF reader also exist, but like it, their internal working is a a trade secret and these programs do not respect your right to control your own privacy and data.
Personally, I've never had a problem with Adobe Reader on any platform, and this site seems to be blatantly against it.
I just don't see the need to have a directory of PDF readers. It's easy enough to Google "open source PDF readers." There just aren't enough of them to justify a directory.
How about a "Readers that don't crash and hang the browser every time" campaign?
What - no Foxit?
Most Windows users couldn't care less about using "shareware" software vs freeware. Evidence: WinRAR
The gaudy interfaces of most FOSS software(like Sumatra) will frighten most sheeple away. Windows users expect complete programs with lots of features, rather than simplistic single-purpose designs.
Okular looks good though - just different - but I'd still opt for Foxit for most people simply because of the presentation... it's good enough that nobody will question where Adobe Reader went.
Now if we could just get all websites to stop depending on the damn Acrobat Reader plugin. I kid you not- I have had to fight several sites we must use at work that, instead of just offering links to necessary PDF files, they check "to make sure you have the Acrobat Plugin installed" and pull some type of plugin call. Extremely annoying. Why not just point the damn link at the PDF file and let the browser decide how to handle it!!!!! Most of us *hate* the Acrobat Reader plugin, we don't WANT to have to look at a PDF file embedded into the web browser.... it is slower, less flexible, doesn't offer all the controls, often doesn't free memory after you close that "page", and doesn't allow us to use some other reader.
And if I had a dollar for every site that claims I *MUST* have Adobe Acrobat Reader in order to look at a damn PDF file, I would be rich.
Pretty much every virus infected PC I've seen in the past few months was originally infected via the magnificence that is Acrobat Reader (and most of the remainder were infected by the meth-using-crack-whore that is the Sun JRE)
The time is right to go after Acrobat. After explaining to someone that the virus that just trashed their PC (or office's PCs) came in by way of a hidden PDF in an infected web page, not only are they OK with removing the Acrobat browser plugins, but they're often open to getting Acrobat off the machine entirely.
Given the rash of shit that Microsoft has (rightfully) received over the years for browser exploits, it's time to hold Adobe and Sun accountable for their dangerously insecure products. Both companies patch management is terrible. Neither provide any decent support for sysadmins to push out updates ("uh, try to find the MSI that the installer drops and then, you know, push it out with something. I think you can do it with Group Policies!" is about as far as they go) For Java it's been easy to say "just get rid of it" since for 99% of people it's unnecessary, but Acrobat and Acrobat Reader have been more of a challenge. Perhaps highlighting how insecure Acrobat is will help move the effort to replace it along.
Fsck the millennium, we want it now.
Millennium Crisis Line: 0890 900 2000 [calls cost 50p/min]
I've often felt like writing a PDF viewer myself, not because I'm at all interested in the problem, but to see how many updates I'd have to release to get it to work. It's that part of the puzzle that intrigues me the most. I figure I could do it in under a thousand, give or take 990.
As someone who really loves to play around with LaTeX, it really irritates me when features in my document can't be seen and tested in anything other than Adobe. There are so many neat things out there (like PDF javascript) but they're just not implemented... It's sad...
Why settle for something you have to install? Sure, FOSS is nice, but there are some great free online web applications for viewing PDF files out there:
PDFescape (a PDF viewer and editor / form filler)
http://www.pdfescape.com
Zoho Viewer (a PDF viewer)
http://viewer.zoho.com/
Google Docs (a PDF viewer is built in now)
http://docs.google.com/
Online webware really is the future for most applications, and the above examples really highlight how well PDF files can be viewed in an online app.
It's a PDF reader, I know acrobat is crummy but honestly. This seem a bit silly. I use foxit and I'm happy with it. FOSS or not I just need to read the file nothing more.
It often produces much smaller compressed files (typically about half the size of a PDF), and there are open source viewers for many platforms. It has plenty of support for annotations, OCR, internal links etc just like PDF, and you can extract the parts and structure of a Djvu document in XML with command line tools and modify them easily.
It's also very easy to cut a Djvu document into individual pages, which lets you publish big documents on websites so that users only need to download the actual pages that they are interested in reading (eg if they want to preview the file without downloading the whole thing). This saves bandwidth, user waiting time, etc.
Last but not least, the Djview viewer renders pages much faster than Acrobat or Xpdf in my experience - so much faster that I regularly get annoyed at the sloness of flipping pages in PDF format. The first thing I do with any paper in PDF format is to convert it using pdf2djvu.
Willing to swap Melbourne weather for any weather from the USA or Siberia.
Are you sure about that? A few days over 40, then back to lovely 30s isn't that bad. I prefer it to 11 straight days over 100f (with plenty over 40c). And certainly over a Siberian winter...
We're better off than Adelaide that's for sure.
My pics.
Unless you haven't used a (somewhat recent) Mac recently, you'd know that you don't need a PDF reader on Mac OS X. The OS itself can open, print and print to PDF directly.
On OS X 10.5, if I press [Space] while I have a PDF document selected in Finder it displays it nearly instantly.
So unless I'm missing something obvious, installing a PDF reader on Mac OS X seems pointless to me.
Other proprietary alternatives to Adobe's PDF reader also exist, but like it, their internal working is a a trade secret and these programs do not respect your right to control your own privacy and data.
A tad melodramatic, isn't it? Ooh, scary secret internal workings... I don't think this is going to increase adoption rates of FOSS PDF readers one bit, and for one simple reason.
No one cares. Sure, maybe a few people do, but the VAST majority of people really couldn't care less if their PDF reader is free as in speech, so long as its free as in beer. They're gonna google "free pdf reader", find Adobe's and use that. Or, if they really don't like Adobe (who could blame them?), they'll see Foxit next on the list, and use that.
If you want to get people to switch, you need your product to be substantially superior in terms of features, not philosophy. Packaging it with something people already have would also be a good method. If there was a PDF reader good enough to be packaged with OOo, that'd be a start.
*Yeah, I know I'll probably get modded down for daring to use FOSS and FUD in the same breath, but come on! That description was so over the top*
Wake me up when you have a free open source replacement for adobe flash.
We've had free (and Free) PDF readers covered for years.
But what about PDF editors? And I don't mean things like OpenOffice that can output its native format into PDF outputs (but can't open the PDFs and edit them) or any similar program on Mac OS X able to print anything to PDF. I mean something that can open and edit a PDF file generated by some other tool where you don't have the original source (or there is none in the case of a scanner scanning to PDF). I mean Adobe Acrobat replacements. Not Acrobat Reader replacements.
Where is that?
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I download Adobe Reader for Linux because some documents can only be seen like they were meant to be seen in it. But I avoid using the .tar.gz installer script: I usually download the .deb, unpack it manually instead of installing it and copy the folder to the /opt limbo. Then I use it only when I really really need it. I don't even bother in creating a link to the binary in /usr/local/bin or something. I keep it hard to use.
Why? Not because it's proprietary, not because I'm a FOSS zealot. Just because it's a bloated piece of crap that offers very little in exchange for a ridiculous loading time and a very intrusive installer that puts icons everywhere, creates dozens of new mimetype associations without saying it and copies its mozilla plugin to three different folders.
Whenever the Adobe Reader (or Acrobat Pro for that matter) is brought into a Slashdot discussion, people invaribaly mention the fact that it insists on checking for updates, which is completely true. It's a pain, and some people also use it as an example of what they hate about Windows.
However, what I'm more surprised about is that a bunch of geeks aren't capable of exploring the options of the update applet:
* Run Adobe Reader/Acrobat Pro, click Help menu -> Check for updates...
* Let it perform a scan, then regardless of whether it found anything to update or not, click Preferences when it appears, and uncheck the "Automatically check for Adobe updates" checkbox.
* Click OK, let it scan again for some reason, then hit Quit. Now it will never bother you again.
Now of course, the default should be for updates to NOT be automatically installed. If necessary it should perform scans by default, but have the update notification unobtrusive, like a little icon in the main GUI for example.
Anyway, I provide these instructions because even though we're supposedly a site full of high-intellect individuals, I continually see this complaint and wonder why people can't just try to solve the problem themselves, either through poking with the options like every geek should (it's fun to explore stuff, isn't it?), or simply Googling for an answer.
Disk space is dirt cheap. That is less than a penny of disk space. Looking over my Reader directory, there is about 32 megs of localization resources. 2 megs of fonts. 40 megs of plugins. 102 megs of setup files so you can repair/change the installation. The actual core binaries seem to be under 5 megs.
There is probably a good reason these are so large anyway--developer time is vastly more expensive than disk space and PDF is a pretty complex beast.
Is it really worth spending months to create more brittle, less readable yet highly optimized code so you can save a penny of disk space?
That works exactly like PDF that is 100% Stallman approved F/OSS?
You can print PDF files out of Word with a free download. There are perl libraries, php libraries and c libraries to create pdf files.
There isn't anything Stallman Free(tm) in existence that does anything close to PDF. And by "close to" I mean has a GUI and is brain dead easy for print shops, design studios, web publishers, API writers and end users to install and use.
OO 3.0 actually can import PDFs. It's the only reason I have it installed on my machine.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
That is the first that comes to mind. Validation on forms. See also: Your IRS 1040
While the .org site is nice and enticing, the footnote re: "May need add'l software" plus Okular's site being less than transparent about how to actually go about using it on Windows is a major barrier for, well, just about anyone who's non-techincal. Does anyone know of instructions somewhere re: how to set it up with Windows?
to install yap you have to compile the code.
and sumatra just fail in terms of resource management (70meg to open a document that says "test 123")
You could just do pdf2ps, then edit the postscript with your favorite text editor and then use ps2pdf.
This is exactly what users don't want ! Sure I could do it (and have, and it's a major pain in my ass), but boss man sure as hell isn't going to start messing around with hand-editing ps files (on command the line, no less !), and neither is any non-programmer/sysadmin in the company.
FOSS needs to offer at the very least parity with closed source in terms of usability if it's going to get anywhere. Firefox didn't get to where it's at by simply being libre, it got there by offering a better user experience - same as Ubuntu.
Tried out Sumatra. I see it doesn't display text I've added with a PDF editor, or highlights I've done, or call-out boxes. Are those features not part of the general PDF spec? Either way, it kind of sucks that someone could open one of these PDFs in Sumatra and not see all sorts of commentary someone else intended, which can be seen if opening the file in Foxit or Adobe Reader for example...
I prefer free software most of the time anyway, but it is astounding how bad Adobe's Acrobat Reader has become.
On Linux, I now use /usr/bin/xpdf on all PDFs by default: it's ugly, but it is incredibly fast to open, and has worked for every document so far.
On Mac OS X, I continue to be impressed with how good the built-in Preview app really is. I've never had a reason to use anything else.
Acrobat Reader 7 on Solaris was so bulky, slow, and full of Annoying Flashy Ads (TM), that I actually kept around an older version (5.0.9) of acroread in order to have better performance and a less irritating GUI.
"Microsoft killed my company, I hold a personal grudge. I don't use Microsoft products and neither should you."-JWZ
Did I miss something? Isn't PDF still proprietary?
How are Open Source applications interfacing with a proprietary file format and not infringing on the copyrights?
The answer I thought was that they are just readers, so Adobe has aloud decoding, but not encoding. Although, OpenOffice can encode PDFs, so now I'm back to confused. :/
Also, why use a proprietary format like PDF in the first place? Laziness?
I have student loans managed through Sallie Mae. I receive statements by email instead of paper. When I logged on, I was directed to a page that tested my ability to view PDFs. If you can't read the PDF, you must get your statements in paper. Well, I usually download PDFs and read them with SumatraPDF. It's a lovely, FOSS, very lightweight (~1 MB) PDF viewer for Windows. Unfortunately, the Sallie Mae test only checks if I can read the PDF with a browser.
So, for the first time in several years, I tried out Adobe Reader. I had to install 8, as the 9 installer kept crashing. Jeebus, it's slow! I don't care so much about a measly couple of hundred MBs, the damn thing crawls. I can download a 10 MB PDF and start reading it before the Adobe plug-in finishes loading the first page.
...is all what's needed. Why dublicate efforts? Even more when both Qt and GTK+ is nicely running in Windows environment (KDE4 is even ported to Win32).
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
Same here, the only current drawback of the OOo import PDF plugin is that you end up with an openoffice draw file (so you can't convert it into a odt AFAIK).
It does allow you to make minor changes, but not being able to open PDFs in Writer does limit the usefulness of this feature. Does anyone know if you can side-step this limitation?
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You can use Skim (http://skim-app.sourceforge.net/) under OS X. Among other things, it allows for document annotation.
All of the software on that web page is free. But I wonder how many of them reproduce the obnoxious feature of Acrobat that it won't let you print certain documents - with no way to override that. If I were the FSFE, I would promote only PDF readers that respect the user's rights (as fair use) to make printed copies of documents, and don't replicate the Adobe DRM.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Any of them can verify cryptographic signatures?
A key missing feature is every Linux PDF reader I've tried is the ability to highlight text. I can't be the only one who needs that...
I use evince for almost everything now (but a few years ago it was a pain in the arse)
Unfortunately my supervisor keeps correcting my thesis with comments embedded in the pdf file. No open source reader (that I know of) let me read all of them. That's why I keep an old copy of Acroread 7 (8 is too slow) around.
On a side note, do you know of any open source application that let you _write_ comments on a PDF file?
PDF is not intended as a format for editing. It is an electronic form of paper. If you want an editable document, use a file format designed for editing. If you export your source document as PDF and then import it in something else, you will lose information (unless you do tricks like embed the source document in the PDF metadata).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
If PDF was not _EVER_ intended as an editable format, then why would adobe acrobat be a PDF editor in the first place? The fact is that PDF is quite editable, as long as one has the necessary tools to do so.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Additionally all of the readers for Free Operating Systems should count as MacOSX readers as well.
But unless the toolkits used by the X11-based PDF readers use the Command key and the Mac's single menu bar as opposed to the Control key and per-window menu bar that Windows and GNOME use, the apps will feel as if they're running in a "Linux emulator". Do any of the PDF readers for GNU/Linux or *BSD feel like Mac apps when compiled and run on a Mac?
Great! Tell me more when they have a free version of Acrobat Pro.
PDF is not intended as a format for editing. It is an electronic form of paper.
Two points.
1) You're simply wrong. There have been PDF editing tools long before the format became ubiquitous as a "read everywhere" standard -- Adobe Acrobat. (What "Abode Acrobat Reader" reads.)
2) I wasn't aware that paper could not be edited. Then again, I use pencil instead of pens.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I read a lot of pdf's on my MacBook, and I never really quite liked Preview.app.
Luckily there's also Skim.app, which I enjoy using daily.
You're simply wrong. There have been PDF editing tools long before the format became ubiquitous as a "read everywhere" standard -- Adobe Acrobat
You can edit it, just as you can edit bitmaps, but this is not what it's designed for. It was created as a non-Turing-complete version of PostScript with better pixmap and compositing support. A lot of the PDF generators go via PostScript, but even the ones that don't lose a lot of information. If you save a Word document as a PDF then you might be able to extract the fact that a heading is a certain font at a certain size[1], but you won't get the fact that it is in 'Heading 3' style. The PDF for my current book has no way of telling you whether a particular bit of monospaced text was typset that way because it's code or a file name.
I wasn't aware that paper could not be edited. Then again, I use pencil instead of pens.
And how well does that work for you when the paper is a print-out? Can you delete words from the printout and have the text reflow? What algorithm does it use - Knuth & Plass line breaking, a greedy strategy, or something else? Neither the paper or the PDF contains this information, so you have to guess.
[1] You won't if you went via a PostScript printer driver then a PS to PDF distiller, because PostScript has no real notion of fonts or glyphs, it just has the ability to write short programs for generating glyphs.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Wow, I thought this was a troll, but I heard then I heard the radio spot for it. Jared's new slogan is actually "Your only salvation to keep your fat cow from leaving you this year for your constant douchebaggery is to buy her some diamonds from Jared." Very edgy!
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
I know, it's quirky. But you can do a lot of things you can't do in any other viewer.
And it's PDF-plugin is written in PostScript. That's ubercool!
Presumably this was inspired by getfirefox.com. So the three key points are:
Good graphic design - always subjective but come on!
Easy - why do I need to know the options for Windows or OS:X, the site can tell I am using Linux. What information do I have for choosing between the programs they offer. For most Linux users the choice of DE is a pretty big factor, but you need screen-shots and feature lists to make an informed decision.
Sell the benefits - The first paragraph is irrelevant, they are linking to software to view a PDF not create one, the user has no choice about the format. The second paragraph assumes people already know the difference between what they mean by free and what Adobe means by free.