Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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.
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.
...so is the Free PDF readers campaign over now?
I would think so, with all the FOSS ones like xPDF and (my favorite) PDF editor. Viewable GPL source code for a PDF reader (and as an added bonus, editor) to me sounds like the end of this campaign. They may not have all the functionality of Acrobat(TM), but they do most of it, contrast OO.o and MSO.
Sorry for the double post, but let me end with a shameless "what the O stands for in FOSS" plug - If you feel up to it, by all means contribute to these projects to fill in for any missing functionality between the FOSS readers/editors and Acrobat(TM). I personally have never used Acrobat(TM), as I always just export from Open Office (another prime example of FOSS PDF functionality), but for someone who may use it on a daily basis and have a decent enough knowledge of C coding/libraries could easily fill in the gaps for the casual user looking for a feature.
I know whenever I see a FOSS alternative missing a feature, I git clone the source, implement it, build (rinse, repeat) then upload it to the nightly build and if more people did that for projects they have a decent understanding of (like these PDF apps) as opposed to others unable to do so because of a lack of knowledge on the subject (like me in this case) then the FOSS world would turn even faster than it already is.
Just my two cents, eh?
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...
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.
What version of Sun JRE was running? I haven't heard of any viruses with Sun Java in years.
So what did Adobe and Sun say when you reported the problem??
Agreed, this is either pure FUD, or the poster was running a way-obsolete version of Acrobat Reader.
Acrobat Reader is a piece of junk, but it's not a major vector for malware.
There is PDFCreator: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/
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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.
Who's annoying whom? Personally, I wouldn't bother with the commercial software you linked to, as Debian has plenty of free tools for handling PDF files already, but if you feel it's worth bringing to slashdotters' attention, great!
The point of Djvu is that it's technically slightly better than PDF for digital document storage and viewing, and since it's free(libre) (<= note relevance to TFA), people who want a small competitive advantage can try it out without risk, now or in ten years or whenever. I happen to like it (not that I'm anyone special), but so do various libraries which tend to think in longer terms than the next year. And of course, the format was developed at AT&T Labs to address digital archiving problems.
BTW, you don't need to keep all your documents in the format you receive them just so other people can read them. That kind of thinking will just make you buy useless copies of Microsoft Office and whatnot, on the off chance that someone else can't find the import command. Always use the best tool for the job, and convert your work to something basic when you need to interoperate.