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."

Re:Overweight...stop eating junk food, Adobe Reade

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't it include loads of fonts?

This one will also let you fill in PDF forms.

One step at a time..

[deacon]

Any release of commercial software for Linux is good, and Adobe should be thanked for doing this.

I have used Xpdf exclusively for a long time. In what way is Adobe reader superior to Xpdf?

huh? a start towards what?

[dAzED1]

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.

both good and bad

[zerkon]

xpdf has always functioned MUCH faster and with MUCH greater stability than any version of acrobat I've ever seen.

That said, Any large commercial vendor releasing their software on Linux is a very good thing. Maybe next some more video game vendors will jump on the bandwagon.

And of course competition is always good. This forces both xpdf and adobe to make themselves better.

Open source not needed - open formats rule

[iamacat]

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.

Re:Heh

[GraemeDonaldson]

Dear AC

You don't have a clue how portage works.

I suppose nvidia-kernel, openoffice-bin, etc. don't exist either?

Why should they open source it?

[DrXym]

If you want open source, use Ghostscript. I assume (and they probably do too) that to open source part of one of their most lucrative product lines would commercial suicide. It's not like the file format is closed because it isn't [adobe.com].

Thumbs up...no crashes...

[Spoing]

For me, v.7 is slick and hasn't crashed. Good job Adobe!

v.5 did crash quite a bit, esp. the browser plugin. Very frustrating. It was comparitively ugly too.

Re:DUPE!!!

[metricmusic]

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...

It's a start?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why does every single thing need to be open sourced. I think it's pretty cool they are releasing a Linux binary.

Re:Open source Acrobat?

[TheRaven64]

Not to mention the far more important fact:

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.

Re:It seems to me...

[Geeky]

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.

Why do they have to Open Source?

[MosesJones]

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.

Re:DUPE!!!

[jellomizer]

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.

I prefer xpdf

[OrangeTide]

I don't know what's so exciting about acroread or whatever. xpdf seems to have a pretty reasonable, if spartan, interface. Cut and paste doesn't work unless you hack it up a bit to side-step PDF's "protections". I tend to run non-x86 Linux systems, so binary only applications aren't as attractive to me anyways.

Re:37Mb??!?!?!

[phunkymunky]

If I want bloat I'll go back to Windows! Thanks for recognising im more l33t than you though, much appreciated!

an unaccepted gesture

[matt me]

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.

Re:DUPE!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Er, no. This is Adobe Reader - the free standalone PDF viewer. It is not Adobe Acrobat, the expensive professional PDF creator. It is a nice utility to have, since Windows users switching will expect to have it. But it is not a significant application.

Re:DUPE!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

> Now if only Adobe would bring Photoshop over as well...

If only people like you who complained that photoshop wasn't available on Linux would bother contributing to GIMP we'd have photoshop for Linux already, just under a different name.

Re:WARNING! Document tracking included

[RedHat Rocky]

When I visit a website, I understand I'm being tracked. Granted, I think sites should explicitly state what kind of tracking they are doing, but as a visitor I certainly have no expectation of privacy (unless I choose to anonymize of course).

If I get some damn PDF in email, I certainly don't expect my PDF reader to report to someone else without my permission. Big difference.

No Linux Acroreader yet. The next step...

[CarpetShark]

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.

Re:It seems to me...

[Dot.Com.CEO]

Well, if a company says "here [adobe.com] is the specification, you have a licence to implement it in whichever way you want as long as it passes standard test A", I don't know, but that actually is the definition of a standard.

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.

Re:Solution for the Windows version

[drinkypoo]

You have a slow PC, if you too are talking about windows. Acrobat 6 comes up quite quickly when you remove all unnecessary plugins. Acrobat 7 uses a tray icon, so it never really quits, or at least it keeps the DLLs warm for you. That's cheating.

Re:Just a reminder about PDFs

[Bob Uhl]

The reason Nielsen writes this sort of thing is because people are making the mistakes of using PDFs for online content--to use your analogy, there are a lot of folks making tea in their washing machines.

Re:Open source Acrobat?

[Halo1]

but there is nothing stopping you from writing your own software to create or display PDFs

Apart from the software patents [ffii.org].

Re:old

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah.. and everyone just LOVES installing .tar.gz 'packages' for everything.

Dependencies? We don't need no stinkin' dependencies..

Re:an unaccepted gesture

[Dhalka226]

I'm not sure why anyone things we should bend over backwards to thank the creators of the proprietary versions for gracing us with their presence.

Because everything begins with small steps. Nero for linux might be trivial, but if what companies see is Nero trying to do something in the linux community and getting their fingers bitten off for not being open enough (which many companies who themselves might offer linux software also are unlikely to be), it is a strong disincentive to even try. And THEIR app might not be so dime a dozen that its loss can simply be written off like that.

Similarly, things like this make linux more attractive to potential converts. Imagine for a moment that you could magically run all of your Windows software on linux. I don't mean something like Wine. Pretend that every single application had a linux port or just plain worked by running the Windows version. Imagine how much easier it would be to convince somebody to switch over. They don't have to re-learn anything, they don't have the huge learning curve--they have everything they had before and they have it in an environment that is more secure.

Why should linux users care if windows l0sers are switching? Because that is what is going to get big companies interested in caring about linux. In just my own limited world view, I know several people who would go into instant orgasms on the spot if, say, Photoshop had a native Linux port all of the sudden. I'm sure there are other lists of applications that would garner similar reactions.

I like linux, but there are still a number of things linux apps don't have that their Windows counterparts do. Voice and video in IM clients comes immediately to mind. Finally, projects like AMSN and gaim-vv are working on them, but their current status appears to be horrid and it is likely to be that way for a while longer yet. I'm not a big fan of that sort of thing myself, but when a friend wants to show you something on his webcam, it's annoying to have to refuse or bid him wait while you reboot into your Windows partition that exists mostly because of little stupid things like that. I'm sure fellow users could easily come up with a tremendous list of things they feel are missing in linux, in whole or in part. Frankly if somebody comes along and fixes (some of) those problems for me, I don't care if they give me the source or not when they do it.

In short, you should thank them because it's not about Nero for linux, or whether Nero for linux is the best CD burning software available or not. You should thank them for taking an interest in linux at all and encourage other companies to do the same. If you don't want to use it, you're free to ignore it--but if all companies like Nero see are the bunch of ungrateful zealots Microsoft likes to portray linux users as, there could very well be long-term consequences.

Re:DUPE!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I see. Because all graphic artists are programmers.