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?"

Good job, Adobe.

[rice_burners_suck]

I think it's about time Adobe starts offering products on Linux... I don't care if this is a bloated peace of junk... I'm using Mac OS X since last year, and there's no problem reading PDFs or PS files there. But Linux is cool for all my server crap, and with more support coming its way, that's fresh and dope.

Now if only they'll port Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, InDesign, and all their other stuff... In other words, gimme the finger, I want the whole hand.

Useful for the fringe cases

[d-rock]

I mostly use gv or gpdf because they're fast and simple for most PDFs. I have to admit, though, that it's nice to have an updated viewer for when I need to do things like deal with forms or some of the other esoteric functions of PDF.

Derek

gpdf rules

[dcstimm]

I use gpdf, it loads all pdfs fine for me, and it intergrates nicely into gnome and mozilla, the only thing it has ever rendered incorrectly was that giant PDF from Mozilla.org when they put the ad in the new york times, the names showed up but the background firefox logo did not show up, So I launched it on my mac and preview opened it with no problems except it took 5 times longer than gpdf, hopefully gpdf fixes that small bug. otherwise its been great

Re:xpdf

[Chuck Chunder]

I bought some tickets [ticketek.com.au] 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.....

vs xpdf

[aasmodeus]

So far I've had problems printing most PDF's to an HP LJ4Si printer, but when I upgraded to 7, those problems went away. Yes, I confirmed that running xpdf or acroread 5 again still showed the same problems (blinking light showing job in printer, stops blinking after several seconds, no typical startup sounds).

FWIW, YMMV.

"Coming to Linux..."

[generationxyu]

No, they mean, "Coming to Linux/x86."

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!

Adobe Reader for Linux is also accessible!

[peterkorn]

I just returned from the CSUN Conference on Technology and Persons with Disabilities [csun.edu] where Pete DeVasto of Adobe was demoing a beta build of Adobe Reader for Linux using the Gnopernicus screen reader [www.baum.ro]. 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.

Re:xpdf

[drgonzo59]

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"

Re:I'll get it now

[innosent]

Seriously who worries about that on a reasonably modern desktop?

Klaus Knopper (Knoppix), or any other Live-CD maintainer, and me (have 50+ Knoppix-based kiosk/office systems to maintain, and like being able to keep the system images under 350MB compressed [current setup is about 320MB compressed, 1.1GB uncompressed, and contains both a kiosk mode and a normal OpenOffice/FireFox/KDE/Evolution mode], plus all of the network and printer drivers from Knoppix). Small but useful components means that a system can be booted from the network and setup with the latest image in 20 minutes. We use Acrobat 4, since it's reasonably current for our uses, loads quickly on older hardware, and keeps the image size down. As I mentioned in another thread, if I can read the splash screen, it's too damn slow.

this is the same Adobe that ...

[bdbafh]

http://www.eff.org/IP/DMCA/US_v_Elcomsoft/us_v_skl yarov_faq.html this is the same Adobe that went after Dmitri Sklyarov. what has changed in their org, board of directors, corporate mindset that should convince me to ever forgive them? Yep - I didn't think so. Lets have a little contest as to how large of objects we can shove up the collective rectum of Adobe. -me

Re:works well

[X0563511]

There's a windows program for the windows reader that lets you turn off all kinds of goodies, (like the plugins that make it slower than xpdf and that annoying advertisement). Now all we need is a linux version of that tool.

Finally! Professional PDF Handling!

[wernst]

Anyone who says xpdf, Preview, kpdf, or "whatever"pdf is Good Enough, or better/faster than genuine Adobe Acrobat isn't really dealing with professional-level PDF files.

I was using Apple's Preview for a while to view contracts, but I never saw certain deadlines - I kept emailing people asking about them, and one day I got the reply that they're where there are supposed to be in the PDF: look again. Whatdayaknow!? Preview didn't display certain form data, AND didn't alert the user that it wasn't displaying it either. Group-based markups frequently get ignored in "alternative" PDF viewers too.

So sure, if all you're reading in PDF are static data sheets and what are essentially "print files," this really isn't big news, but if you actually use PDF files to work with big companies ino order to earn a living, this is great news!

Adobe is just

[Polir]

jumping on the bandwagon...If linux would fail on the desktop he would forget Linux, but since Linux desktop is getting to be a viable alternative, they just can't afford to miss it. They sure don't want to lose the future's market so as good capitalists even they sleep with M$ or Apple today they will choose to sleep with Linux if need be... Sorry about the rant but that's my opinion about Adobe's "commitment" to Linux. And I think it is good, there are more choices and I hope that gpdf and open source alternatives will get to the same level and less bloat in the next years.

A little off topic, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't understand why Microsoft hasn't gotten on the pdf "game". I mean, add some sort of pdf viewer into XP, and especially the ability to (automatically, not with any 'distiller') make pdf files through Word.

They already did it with .zip files. The embedded zip tools in XP do the job for me a lot easier and less annoyingly than a shareware version of winzip (the last version I had reminded me I was using the shareware for 500+ days).

I would imagine that doing so would be HIGHLY damaging to Adobe, and honestly, I would use it because Acrobat gets more and more irritating with every new incarnation. And I mean, what are the difficulties/legalities especially since the open source people seem to be on the ball?

Just a thought...

I just installed it; it's a big improvement

[Anonymous Coward]

Just the fact that it uses GTK makes it look so much better. I wish they would also release a KDE native version, but this is great.

Re:xpdf

[Erik Hensema]

Acrobat Reader 7 is required to do your taxes in the Netherlands (for buisinesses, private persons can still use paper). So now at least we can do our taxes on Linux. I welcom Acrobat 7!

It's a good thing.

[breakbeatninja]

The more support the better, especially from mainstream vendors like Adobe. Of course, I would really like to see Photoshop, Illustrator and others come to Linux (and therefore, *BSD through Linux emulation at the least). Adobe gains customers, the open source community gets more applications and more people can migrate away from Windows without excuses. Sure there's GIMP, but some people don't want to learn an entirely new application if they don't have to.

x86 only

[Chris L. Mason]

People keep forgetting that Linux is not x86-only. It runs on lots of other platforms (probably ppc/ppc64 is the second most popular.)

So this isn't going to help me (nor will it help Linus!)

Re:you can get acrobat reader 7 to load fast

[Anonymous Coward]

You are correct. But a better way is to store all the other plugins inside the Optional folder (make it), because that way if some document explicitly needs some other plugin besides those 3 AR will look inside the 'Optional' folder and load it.

Much, much faster.
With 6.0 (Win) I wouldn't even click the pdf links on the web, because it would take quite a while to load AR, but now I can click like 10 pdf links and I hardly even notice Firefox stuttering when loading AR.

I'm not beeing a fanboy here, but it is clear that Adobe did put alot of effort into Acrobat 6.0, both the Linux/Mac and Windows versions.

Btw, you got this info (as well as me) from Adobe Reader SpeedUp application (win32 only) which basically does the same thing I described, but it can also do somre (not really *that* useful) more things. For instance it _should_ remove the ad from AR but I can't make it to do so on Windows... It also provides all the info about the plugins and their dependecies but you can also view them from AR - Help - Plugin Info.

Ability to edit a PDF?

[haluness]

I mainly work on Linux and prepare documents with LaTeX. However a very useful feature would be to edit a PDF (and not by opening the PDF in Vim!).

This would be a great help when collaborating with others who don't use LaTeX. Even the ability to simply add annotations to a certain peice of text would be extremely useful.

Does anybody know of anything that can do this under Linux?

We'll see a QT based Photoshop soon?!?

[vhogemann]

See,

QT is a great multi-plataform toolkit... it can render beautifully under Windows or MacOSX, witch are the main target plattaforms for Adobe.

It would make a lot of sense to Adobe port their core applications to a toolkit that can compile on all their target plattaforms, plus Linux!

Hey, its happening!! We already have Acrobat Reader and PhotoShop Album made using QT.

Plus, if Adobe could be untied from both Windows and MacOSX, their products would become a LOT more acessible... A dedicated Linux box running Photoshop + Illustrator would be a great solution for a lot of graphic houses out there!

Now, if the XOrg guys could fix the XImput system, so my Wacom tablet would get configured automagicaly via hotplug without having to manualy edit the config files... wow, that would be perfect!!

Re:Evince+Poppler - free / usable rendering.

[sremick]

I've tried gpdf and Evince. The problem is, they don't read all PDFs correctly.

Example: I have one which began life as an OpenOffice document. It contains a large PNG image that has a transparent background. I used OO to export as PDF. In the Adobe Acrobat reader, the document looks fine. In gpdf and Evince, the transparency in the image isn't honored and appears as a black box around the graphic, blocking out part of the surrounding text.

Not good.

Other PDF readers might be smaller, faster, and integrated into the UI better... but only Adobe's consistantly displays PDFs correctly for me. I was very happy to see it hit the FreeBSD ports system (ahem... a WEEK ago. Nice to know Slashdot is on the ball)... and have been using it ever since.

A Fully Functional Acrobat Suite is Necessary

[SA Stevens]

People who have never used the actual Adobe Acrobat product likely will not understand.

There are a number of decent and reliable methods to output to a 'PDF-format'. There is only one tool, the Adobe Acrobat Suite, to annotate and augment your PDF files.

I like to produce tables-of-content, to be able to use an easy graphical method to arrange pages, crop them, etc. I am afforded this ability by the commercal Adobe Acrobat product (which is rather expensive per-seat)

Adobe should get beyond their 'touch it gingerly' approach to Linux. Release some of your actual tools for Linux, not just a half-baked 'Reader' to look at their output.

No CUPS support. :(

[heathm]

Don't get me wrong. I'm very excited about Adobe Reader 7.0 on Linux. I love that it uses GTK, starts quickly and looks really good. Unfortunately, however, the printing still sucks as it doesn't support cups. I can't go and select the printer I want to use from a drop down. I personally can manage without this but I know a number of non-technical people that hate not having this.