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?"

I'll get it now

[jlrowe]

Bloat or not, it is still the best reader for Adobe Acrobat files. And I need to do some of those added features like 'fill in forms', password protected forms, etc.

For instance, my Bank Statements have been coming in password protected files for years now. So I very much welcome this new product.

I'd rather use xpdf

[PissingInTheWind]

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?

Re:xpdf

[neXus_umr]

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.

Direct Link

[Anonymous Coward]

For the impatent:

ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/reader/unix/7x/7.0/e nu/ [adobe.com]

Re:xpdf

[yanestra]

What's wrong with xpdf? I am sure it loads a heck of a lot faster.

You still can't read each and every PDF document with xpdf, especially DRM protected files are impossible to view...

Re:I'd rather use xpdf

[mz001b]

The "only" drawback I see is that sometimes when reading certain articles I get some really ugly, pixelated fonts.

when doing dvips using -Ppdf or -Pcmz (if you are using the Computer Modern fonts, to embed outlines in the ps file instead of low resolution bitmaps -- it makes the resulting PDF (from ps2pdf) much better.

Nice

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Finally!

[mfago]

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...

Re:xpdf

[Compholio]

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.

works well

[darthpenguin]

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 [mdek.net].

Evince+Poppler - free / usable rendering.

[snickell]

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 [gnome.org], 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.

kpdf rocks

[nileshbansal]

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.

Re:Evince+Poppler - free / usable rendering.

[snickell]

For those complaining about the sluggishness of Xpdf at rendering pages, we're working on that. We consider that the largest usability problem with Poppler based viewers right now (Evince & XPDF). We've already made the thumbnailer code on the left substantially faster and are looking at doing things like pre-emptively rendering pages as you scroll toward them so there's no lag (in addition to improving the raw pages/sec rendering speed).

you can get acrobat reader 7 to load fast

[MarcoAtWork]

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!

Re:xpdf

[Narchie Troll]

You can select text to copy. Drag over the text and it works exactly like any other X11 application -- middle-click to paste.

Old News, Old News

[Ditaki]

This has been on the front page of http://www.fedoraforum.org/ [fedoraforum.org]FedoraForum.org[FedoraF orum.org] for a while now. Kinda late news, as I've been using it for a while now.

Re:I'll get it now

[El Cubano]

Bloat or not, it is still the best reader for Adobe Acrobat files.

It's only bloated if you have a problem with sacrificing ~100 MB of hard drive space. Seriously who worries about that on a reasonably modern desktop? I just bought to 160 GB drives the other day for US$ 80 each. Drive space is not a problem.

I have been using the new version for a week and much more impressed with it than I was with version 5.

Here are the things I like:

• Uses GTK. I am not GTK fanboy (I prefer GNUStep), but at least it is better than that awful interface the previous versions had.
• Mozilla plugin that works just like it does on the popular legacy operating system still floating around out there.
• It is basically a tar file, no hidden toolbars to install for you.
• Way snappier than the previous version.
• No more having to mess with numlock to get pgup/pgdn working.
• Has preference settings for a MUA a web browser and several other apps you can launch for various functions (e.g., I open a PDF in Firefox and click the email button to see it open a new compose window in Thunderbird with the PDF I am viewing in Firefox already attached. Sweet!)

Things I don't like:

• The went to that blasted MDI. I want every flipping document to open in its own window. Is that so hard? Is it too much to ask?
• The OK button in all the dialogs is squished, quite annoying.
• You must manually include it in your menu. It should at least hit the majors (GNOME, KDE).

Re:But will it be x86_64?

[NotoriousQ]

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.

Re:gpdf rules

[Anonymous Coward]

Try evince. It's a new document viewer for Gnome, it also integrates nicely into the enviroment, it's fast and it can do a lot more than gpdf can do, for example you can now finally search the document or copy and paste parts of it.

http://www.gnome.org/projects/evince/

Re:xpdf

[El Cubano]

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.

Re:you can get acrobat reader 7 to load fast

[Anonymous Coward]

Put them in a directory called "Optional" and the program loads them when they are required. No clue why this isn't default behavior for some of the more obscure plugins.

Re:xpdf

[nigham]

Please... you can't even scroll across pages with the direction keys in xpdf! its a page reader, not a document reader

Re: Direct Link

[Black Parrot]

For Gent00zers, it has ~86 in portage for about a week.

Haven't tried it.

Re:xpdf

[molnarcs]

Have you tried it? Adobe7 loads as fast as xpdf (approximately), but it renders documents a lot faster :) btw I was surprised at the "news", for portupgrade (freebsd) replaced my acrobat5 to 7 a week or so ago. I was thinking the same way you did, but my expectations were based on my experience with 5. When I tried it actually, I replaced kghostview as the default pdf viewer to acrobat in firefox (and elsewhere) - because it is fast, it displays pdf correctly - not that xpdf doesn't, I just like the fact that I don't have to zoom all the time (and wait) because acro fits the image/document to (full)screen automatically. It also has niceties like settings for LCD displays (I own one, so this is a godsend).

Try it first, compare it with xpdf, and choose what suits your need - just dont' discard it offhand, because it is a Good Thing >)

Re:xpdf

[Anonymous Coward]

I've used it to save filled-in PDF documents as postscript (print to file). Not quite as convenient as saving it in an easily editable format, but works nicely for record-keeping. In theory, you can hack the postscript file to edit (in fact, you could probably enter text like "FIRST NAME" and "LAST NAME" in the forms, print to postscript, and then edit the tags through a script with sed. I should try that some time to see if it would actually work.)

Re:I'd rather use xpdf

[klevin]

I've found that using pdflatex produces more compact pdf files and gets rid of the jaggies. I don't actually write in latex, just use Lyx and it has three options for creating pdf files. One of them being pdflatex.

On a side note, Lyx has saved me more time than I can count over the last three or four years. I hate having to run a word processor anymore. You end up having to micro-manage all the little details. If want that much fine tuning, I'll use a desktop publishing app. For writing talks and most anything, Lyx's document processing approach seems far superior. I've even got my resume in Lyx. Export it to plain text, pdf or ps and send it on it's way. Only hassel is when a recruiter insists on Word format, then I have to drag out OpenOffice and export it from there.

Lyx took a bit of getting used to, after years of fiddling every detail in various word processors. Once I figured out the HFill feature and the paragraph layout panels, though, I never looked back. I spend a lot of time writing outlines and it works awesome for that.

Re:Useful combination = Acrobat + OO

[Brandybuck]

On the other hand, OpenOffice saves in OpenOffice format very well!

For Gentooists

[Eil]

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.)

emerge sync
echo 'app-text/acroread ~x86' >> /etc/portage/package.keywords
emerge acroread

Loads fast, looks okay (GTK), and most importantly CLOSES WITH ONLY ONE MOUSE CLICK.

Been Out for a While....

[schestowitz]

On the 17th of the month, somebody in our department posted the following message:

I've just noticed that Adobe Acrobat Reader 7 is now available from adobe.com as a pre-release tar ball and rpm. I'm sure many people will want to upgrade this.

So, it's been out for a while, even publicly

Re:kpdf rocks

[ashayh]

You cannot fill forms with Kpdf. Thats its only problem.(And possibly encrypted Pdfs)

Apart from that, I'd like to give kongrats and big thanks to the Kpdf and Kde devs for making a GREAT pdf viewer with KDE 3.4 ! Its got the best combination of features and speed. And a big jump from the earlier version. I think they now collaborate with the xpdf guys. I hope they can find a solution for the forms problem.

I'd like to remind people that apart from Open Office, ALL apps(that I've tried) in Gnome and KDE, that have the Print command on a menu can create Pdf files.

Acrobat 7 is somehow slower for me than 5. (Like the WinXP version 7 was slower than 6) Acro 7 takes forever to startup as Adobe insists on loading plugins I would never use. You could remove the plugin files that can be a hassle sometimes.

Re:I'll get it now

[Waffle Iron]

It's only bloated if you have a problem with sacrificing ~100 MB of hard drive space.

That's not the only issue. Bloated programs use more system memory. Loading a huge program will often knock good chunks of your other running tasks into swap memory, or at the very least flush out part of your cached I/O buffers. This can cause a significant hit to your overall system responsiveness, especially on machines without boatloads of physical RAM.

Re:you can get acrobat reader 7 to load fast

[Brandybuck]

I spoke too fast. The Slashdot reputation for inaccurate information holds true. The files in Optional are not loaded on demand (at least not in the Linux version).

Re:Desktop superiority?

[peawee03]

Exactly. As an architecture student, I live and die by AutoDesk and Adobe products. I know a few computer literate architects who would love to switch to Linux, but what's the point of going Linux if they still spend all their time on a WinXP box for CAD and presentation layouts?

Re:Bloat would be okay if...

[natrius]

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!

In that case, you're in luck. If you're using Gnome 2.10, you can use Evince, [gnome.org] which uses the current Gnome printing dialog that allows you to print multiple copies. Sorry to beat a dead horse, but Evince really is a lot better than gpdf. If you're using KDE, I'm sure KPDF does the same thing.

shameless gentoo plug/mod parent up

[schmobag]

After reading about this in the Gentoo Weekly Newsletter [gentoo.org] on Monday, I emerged acroread 7, and it works like a charm. It's a definite improvement over version 5.

Re:kpdf rocks

[Anonymous Coward]

> 5. KDE app. Native look and feel.

I don't get your native look and feel, I'm using Window Maker, you insensitive clod !

acroread 7 scrolls fine

[slashbart]

Just installed it, and it works fine. Scrolling with the weel also, same in fileselection boxes.

Bart

Re:xpdf

[ssbljk]

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.

Re:works well

[SmilingBoy]

You can disable the banner easily:
Edit->Preferences->Startup
Uncheck "Show messages and automatically update"
(This works on Windows, so I guess it is the same on Linux as well)

This is not the final

[Sidn]

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 [heise.de] (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.

Re:works well

[Spoing]

"You can disable the banner easily:
Edit->Preferences->Startup
Uncheck "Show messages and automatically update"
(This works on Windows, so I guess it is the same on Linux as well)"

That it does...thanks!

Re:I'd rather use xpdf

[Stevyn]

Are you comparing this to acroread 5 or acroread 7? Because acroread 7 loads nearly instantly. I don't know what they did, but this works a hell of a lot better than any version of acrobat I've used in windows.

Re:you can get acrobat reader 7 to load fast

[Navreet]

You can easily acheive the same effect using the GUI. I think it's better to do it using the GUI so you don't accidently mess up something behind the scenes. Here's how you can do it: Edit->Preferences->Startup then check "Use only certified plugins" and BAM... acroread loads REALLY quickly

flpsed

[Kludge]

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?

Re:kpdf rocks

[Anonymous Coward]

Filling forms is on the todo for the next release of kpdf ;)

Re:kpdf rocks

[JohnFluxx]

Oh btw, kpdf can handle encyption/DRM. There's even a compile time flag to ignore the DRM restrictions :) :) Several distros compile with it set. (This is quite new btw - I think it got in before the kde 3.4 release)

Re:xpdf

[scarolan]

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.

Re:xpdf

[SlamMan]

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.

Bloat?

[kosmosik]

Actually it is quite fast. Compared to f.e.:

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 /opt/acrobat7
36M /opt/acrobat7

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).

Re:I'll get it now

[alder]

Bloated programs use more system memory.

There is a way to "shrink" Reader's memory usage. There was/is a recepe [codebetter.com] to make Reader 6 load faster. And though 7.0 is not very slow to start up, the same recepe is still useful to follow as most of plug-ins are not needed for each and every document you read. I found that keeping only EWH32.api, HLS.api, IA32.api, Search.api, and Search5.api in plug_ins gives me all the functionality I ever wanted from the Reader, yet keeps almost 30M of other stuff out of automatic preloading.

Good product

[drigz]

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).

Re:Please shut up

[MynockGuano]

I submitted this last week, with a funnier headline!

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 .pdf that it did not render correctly, but it unfortunately will not render pure postscript.

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!

Re:I'll get it now

[siplus]

After installing the RPM i found on their ftp site for fedora core 3, i found TWO instances of adobe acrobat reader in my KDE menu...

The TAR and RPM are available here: ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/reader/unix/7x/7.0/e nu/

Re:xpdf

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:xpdf

[Anonymous Coward]

Although you can't save it to disk you can always print it. So simply print to file and then you get a ps file. You can then use ps2pdf to get a pdf.

Re:I'll get it now

[Skuld-Chan]

Couple things - a) Acrobat is totally modular. Remove what you don't need and use what you do. b) there's actually a whole command line structure for Acrobat (I used to work in support for this product) where you can disable the splash screen (its also a menu option).

Enjoy!

Re:xpdf

[Anonymous Coward]

Acrobat Reader can save form info to a URL if the PDF is programmed to do so. So you can have a CGI/PHP/ASP/JSP etc script that stuffs the info in a database. You can program a PDF to retrieve form data from from a URL too. The data can be encoded as FDF or as XML in version 5 and later.

Adobe has a system that allows the ability to save form data locally into a PDF for version 5 and 6. With version 7 the system is different ( new name too - LiveCycle ) but allows the same thing. Check the following URL, or search for LiveCycle Reader Extensions -

http://www.adobe.com/products/server/readerexten si ons/main.html

The US IRS uses this to allow Tax forms in PDF to be filled out and the info saved to the hard drive.

There also is the Acrobat Elements product that allows form info to be saved, it is only available in licenses for multiple copies at about US $40 per seat.

GTKLP is the answer...

[wernst]

The answer for programs like this is GTKLP. Just install it via whatever installer system you have (Synaptic Package Manager or whatever).

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...

Re:you can get acrobat reader 7 to load fast

[MarcoAtWork]

to remove the ad (top right corner) in windows just go in the options and uncheck the item that says 'check for updates and display messages'

Bloated?!?! WTF!

[Whatchamacallit]

It's not bloated!

I haven't tried the Linux version yet, but I have run both the Windows version and the Mac OS X versions.

Sure, it's a large installation; about 100MB's give or take 10-20MB's for each platform. But who out there seriously has disk space issues nowadays? I mean you can get a 160GB disk for under a $100 bucks! I remember paying several hundred dollars for a hard disk that wasn't even a gig in size! Disk space is cheap.

Sure, it takes a lot of RAM but who out there seriously has memory problems? Aren't most people running 512MB's or even 1GB or 2GB's? RAM is cheap.

I just loaded a 555 page eBook PDF that is encrypted and authorized. I've paged through it and jumped around a bit while I monitored it's memory usage on OS X. Once it settled down after loading and caching pages, it stabilized at less that 1% CPU usage, 7 threads, and memory usage of 48MB's.

Heck, Safari is using more then twice that amount of RAM just to load Slashdot! Bloated, my ass!

Want to talk Bloated? Take a look at Microsoft Word! Just built a document that is 20 pages of plain unformatted text with no pictures, etc. Word is taking more then 9% CPU, and 40MB's or RAM. I even have the spell checker turned off!

But seriously, unless an application hogs the CPU and consumes most of your RAM while it brings your OS to it's knees, forcing it to swap to disk, you can't call it bloated anymore.

Acrobat Reader 7 is a seriously improved version of the application. If you are running 5 or 6, I would highly recommend you upgrade to 7! It's blazingly fast to load and run. Whoever optimized the load time and fixed all the bugs did a freaking great job! I suspect they did something to optimize the loading of plugins as that was what took so long when loading Acrobat 5 and 6. Probably did something similar to XP when it boots, i.e. defers the loading of startup apps, etc.

You can talk about XPDF and other free (open) alternatives but they don't offer the features I need. I have to be able to decrypt purchased documents. i.e. I buy a book and get a discounted eBook to go along with it or just the ebook. I've got hundreds of reference guides that I use with Acrobat. I got tired of lugging 3" thick programming books around with me. Now, they are all stored on a USB Flash memory drive on my keychain or on a laptop. I heard about some school giving iPods to students and placing a bunch of eBooks on the hard disks. I doubt anyone reads the books on the iPod screen, but it makes a great way to store a ton of books.

Re:I'll get it now

[innosent]

ultra-low budget stuff

Healthcare Industry. 'nuff said? Mostly older PIIIs picked up in lots of 50-100 on eBay. We put these kiosks in our client's facilities. If we spend $200 on each system (which is about right, counting printer), we MIGHT earn that money back in 2 months, not counting the time it takes to install it. It's volume business, not at all high-profit.

Also, these are field machines, usually without CD or DVD drives. Having an image that can be downloaded over a DSL or Cable modem quickly makes it easier to do field upgrades or re-image machines.