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Adobe Reader 7.0 Coming to Linux 454

Posted by Hemos from the get-er-done dept.
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?"
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Adobe Reader 7.0 Coming to Linux More

Adobe Reader 7.0 Coming to Linux

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  • I'll get it now (Score:5, Informative)

    by jlrowe ( 69115 ) on Friday March 25, 2005 @01:10AM (#12043656)
    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.

    • Re:I'll get it now (Score:5, Informative)

      by El Cubano ( 631386 ) on Friday March 25, 2005 @01:35AM (#12043815)

      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:I'll get it now (Score:5, Interesting)

        by innosent ( 618233 ) <jmdority.gmail@com> on Friday March 25, 2005 @01:48AM (#12043886)
        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.

        • Re:I'll get it now (Score:3, Informative)

          by Skuld-Chan ( 302449 )
          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:I'll get it now (Score:5, Informative)

        by Waffle Iron ( 339739 ) on Friday March 25, 2005 @02:38AM (#12044119)
        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.

    • What is with all this concern about bloat for the Slashdot Community. I think you fail to understand that a commercial for profit company is releasing a free (as in beer) program. So this program are written by programmers who at the time are not directly making them money and when they finish the product they can go onto more money making ventures (such as the next version of acrobat writer) So they got it to run and run at a speed that is usable on modern systems. They are not going to put in twice the t
      • Adobe is more concerned with Acrobat Reader working correctly than they are with bloat. Acrobat has become THE file standard in the printing industry. (We used to receive Quark or Illustrator files, along with a bunch of photos, text files, and fonts - now all we need is a properly distilled .pdf.) And believe me, there are plenty of people out there who are very picky about the tiniest matters in their printed pieces. Since customers are often getting their proofs over email or the web in the form of .p

  • Now (Score:2, Funny)

    by NIK282000 ( 737852 )
    Linux users can endure the eternal system lag that is .pdf

  • I'd rather use xpdf (Score:5, Informative)

    by PissingInTheWind ( 573929 ) on Friday March 25, 2005 @01:11AM (#12043665)
    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:I'd rather use xpdf (Score:5, Informative)

      by mz001b ( 122709 ) on Friday March 25, 2005 @01:13AM (#12043686)
      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.

    • Re:I'd rather use xpdf (Score:5, Informative)

      by klevin ( 11545 ) on Friday March 25, 2005 @02:17AM (#12044024) Homepage Journal
      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:I'd rather use xpdf (Score:3, Informative)

      by Stevyn ( 691306 )
      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.

  • Direct Link (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 25, 2005 @01:11AM (#12043673)
    For the impatent:

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

  • Useful combination = Acrobat + OO (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Johann ( 4817 ) on Friday March 25, 2005 @01:12AM (#12043675) Homepage
    Since I work with many people who *still* have not switched to Open Office, I tend to export my OO files into PDF. At least I preserve my formatting much better than if I save as MS Office formats [filtering is better in OO 2.x I'm told].

    PDF is also useful for sending read-only stuff like contracts or proposals - if you're the consultant types.

    Now that Adobe updated Acrobat, maybe some of the more recent PDFs will be more renderable in Linux.
    • PDF is a great format, but I've never had anything but trouble with Acrobat Reader after version 5. It used to be a pretty decent piece of software, but now I dread the times I accidentally click a PDF link in my web browser and then have to wait 20-30 seconds on my super high speed computer for the Acrobat Reader to stop maxing my CPU and locking up all my browser windows.


      Unfortunately enough people use newer features in PDF files that I can't stick with the lower version....


  • It's time (Score:3, Insightful)

    by mfos.org ( 471768 ) on Friday March 25, 2005 @01:13AM (#12043682)
    Thank god. I was just about to send them an e-mail, I get encrypted PDFs all the time, and I don't like having to bust out my laptop or VMWare. Glad they finally got with the pogram

  • Desktop superiority? (Score:5, Funny)

    by node 3 ( 115640 ) on Friday March 25, 2005 @01:13AM (#12043690)
    Believe me, we most certainly don't point to Acrobat Reader when pointing out "desktop superiority".

    In fact, I'd say it's pretty much the other way around!

  • Nice (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 25, 2005 @01:14AM (#12043691)
    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.

  • Good job, Adobe. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by rice_burners_suck ( 243660 ) on Friday March 25, 2005 @01:14AM (#12043693)
    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.

  • Finally! (Score:5, Informative)

    by mfago ( 514801 ) on Friday March 25, 2005 @01:14AM (#12043694)
    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...

  • Useful for the fringe cases (Score:3, Interesting)

    by d-rock ( 113041 ) on Friday March 25, 2005 @01:14AM (#12043697) Homepage
    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

  • Reader Extensions (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 25, 2005 @01:16AM (#12043707)
    One really cool thing about the 7.0 version of Adobe Readers is that they can be extended with Adobe LiveCycle Reader Extensions [adobe.com] to add features that are normally only available when you buy Adobe Acrobat. Of course, Reader Extensions costs something. But what's great is that given the right "pixie dust", Linux is no longer a platform for just viewing PDFs, but it can do PDF Collaboration and forms routing just like its Windows and Macintosh counterparts.

  • gpdf rules (Score:3, Interesting)

    by dcstimm ( 556797 ) on Friday March 25, 2005 @01:18AM (#12043721) Homepage
    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

  • works well (Score:5, Informative)

    by darthpenguin ( 206566 ) on Friday March 25, 2005 @01:21AM (#12043739) Homepage

    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].

    • Re:works well (Score:2, Interesting)

      by X0563511 ( 793323 ) *
      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.

    • Re:works well (Score:4, Informative)

      by SmilingBoy ( 686281 ) on Friday March 25, 2005 @05:23AM (#12044640)
      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)

  • Evince+Poppler - free / usable rendering. (Score:5, Informative)

    by snickell ( 860872 ) on Friday March 25, 2005 @01:21AM (#12043740)

    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.

    • Re:Evince+Poppler - free / usable rendering. (Score:4, Informative)

      by snickell ( 860872 ) on Friday March 25, 2005 @01:24AM (#12043759)
      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).
    • Yeah, evince rocks. It is finally a true xpdf replacement. The one feature that isn't in gpdf, but is in xpdf is text search. evince has text search. gpdf also in my experience was far from stable.
    • Evince seems very promising (not to mention the whole emerging framework thing that seems to be going around lately).

      The one thing I have not seen any other reader than Acrobat do is form filling. Get that into Poppler (or would it be evince/KPDF?), and you would make a lot of people very, very happy.
    • Yes, Evince is absolutely fantastic. The fullscreen, find, and thumbnail features set it apart from any other PDF viewer. And its load time is absolutely incomparable to any other PDF viewer. And its interface is simpler. And... and... and.... After an experience with Evince, I can't imagine going back to Acrobat. I can't even imagine going back to xpdf.
    • 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 integrate

  • vs xpdf (Score:2, Interesting)

    by aasmodeus ( 862363 )
    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.

  • you can get acrobat reader 7 to load fast (Score:5, Informative)

    by MarcoAtWork ( 28889 ) on Friday March 25, 2005 @01:31AM (#12043788)
    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!

  • Old News, Old News (Score:2, Informative)

    by Ditaki ( 859078 )
    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.

  • "Coming to Linux..." (Score:5, Interesting)

    by generationxyu ( 630468 ) on Friday March 25, 2005 @01:32AM (#12043801) Homepage
    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!

  • Bloat would be okay if... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by tomRakewell ( 412572 ) on Friday March 25, 2005 @01:36AM (#12043823)

    I could deal with the bloat if the damn thing is more stable than Acrobat 5. It is one of the only closed-source desktop apps I use regularly in running my business. (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! Does nobody print multiple copies of PDFs but me?)

    It also happens to be the one app that routinely destroys the desktop. I often have to ssh into the desktop boxes because Acrobat has seized all input and won't let go. My employees frequently abandon virtual desktops because the Acrobat splash screen won't go away and they don't know how to kill it. (Have to show them how to use xkill I guess).

    Acrobat 5 doesn't integrate well with the Linux desktop. It has a rude habit of grabbing keyboard input at unexpected times -- I have trouble switching virtual desktops using certain window managers because Acrobat always receives the F1 key, not the window manager.

    The Acrobat 5 Firefox plugin is nasty -- if you drag your mouse pointer into the main window while the Acrobat plugin is running, it seizes all keyboard input; you can't even type anything into the location bar until you drag the mouse pointer back up to the Firefox menu bar.

    While writing this message I launched Acrobat Reader 5 to remind myself of what the problems were, and within two minutes it locked up and I had to kill the beast by remotely logging in from another computer.

    So if Acrobat 7 solves any of these problems, I'll probably use it gladly, bloat and all. Come on, Adobe! I swear that if you wrote quality Linux desktop apps, people would use them. They might even *pay for them* (ahem, Photoshop... ahem, Illustrator).

    • 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.

  • Adobe Reader for Linux is also accessible! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by peterkorn ( 712751 ) on Friday March 25, 2005 @01:37AM (#12043828)
    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.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • 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
  • KPDF and KGhostview cover anything I need to do.
    What I would really like is a full PDF creator/editor.... That would impress me..

  • After reading a few comments here. . . (Score:5, Insightful)

    by episodic ( 791532 ) on Friday March 25, 2005 @02:12AM (#12043993) Homepage Journal
    I've decided that linux users are in large a hard to please bunch :) . . .

    Seriously though, we should be glad that the acrobat reader has been updated. This is one area that is still fairly essential for a corporate desktop. Corporate types wanna know silly things like why do I use something called xpdf and my colleagues at xyz company have the newest adobe. As a computer person, you can smile at this behavior - however, many of you realize discussions such as this is what continues to marginalize Linux from gaining marketshare.

    Corporate entities should be thanked for releasing software to Linux. They DO NOT PROFIT from it at this point by and large. I'm sure someone can pull up a random example to the contrary. However, by and large there is little profit. Those companies that choose to support linux in whatever fashion probably do so at the behest of some visionary individuals within the corporate ranks that see fit to expend corporate resources on the project - again not because of profit - but because of future potential of one.

    That's right, imho companies are placing small wagers on Linux - and we, the OSS community need to make these wagers pay off eventually by concentrating on increasing our numbers. When that happens - the wagers placed by companies will be larger and larger - and eventually we will get things we've always wanted for Linux.

    Don't beat up or be overly critical of corporate efforts. Please remember if you've got a favorite OSS solution to a product that a corporate entity is trying to offer a solution for, then that is the best of both worlds - not an attack on yours.
  • for those interested, debian packages are now available at ftp://ftp.nerim.net/debian-marillat/

    deb ftp://ftp.nerim.net/debian-marillat/ unstable main
  • 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

  • For Gentooists (Score:4, Informative)

    by Eil ( 82413 ) on Friday March 25, 2005 @02:29AM (#12044072) Homepage Journal

    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.

  • Another great addition (Score:3, Insightful)

    by FidelCatsro ( 861135 ) <fidelcatsro@gmaDALIil.com minus painter> on Friday March 25, 2005 @02:54AM (#12044198) Journal
    Im sure we will have plenty of people harp on about how XPDF is faster(which it is) or how the adobe reader is not compact , or how it has more bloat than a whale. The fact still remains that it renders PDFs excelently and it is another product for the linux world .

    OSS is about freedom and our right to choose what we run.
    Every port to linux or BSD or one of the other alternat Operating systems is a major victory for freedom of choise. As much as i respect RMS and his iron stance on GNU everything , i have to disagree and say we also need to allow people to decide how they want there product licensed.

    with Adobe finaly updating the antiquated reader , its just one more sign linux is gaining a stronger foothold in the desktop market, Now i may really dislike windows though i dont want to see it vanish , i want to see all products having an equal(or near enough) market share ,.
    Let us hope we soon see photoshop on linux , the gimp is cool but right now linux really needs a program in that class with a little more omph .

    Its the freedom to decide if you want to run comercial or OSS
    And the freedom to decide if you want to sacrafice a bit of HDD space and RAM space for frankly better PDF rendering(right now atleast , the xpdf team are doing a great job)

  • This is not the final (Score:3, Informative)

    by Sidn ( 415686 ) on Friday March 25, 2005 @05:31AM (#12044666)
    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.

  • Bloat? (Score:3, Informative)

    by kosmosik ( 654958 ) <kos@kosmoMONETsik.net minus painter> on Friday March 25, 2005 @08:09AM (#12045120) Homepage
    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).

  • Ability to edit a PDF? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by haluness ( 219661 ) on Friday March 25, 2005 @08:27AM (#12045193)
    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?

  • Good product (Score:3, Informative)

    by drigz ( 804660 ) on Friday March 25, 2005 @08:32AM (#12045216)
    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).

  • Why!? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by borud ( 127730 ) on Friday March 25, 2005 @09:30AM (#12045640) Homepage
    why is it that any, even moderately, popular piece of software gets bloated so badly it eventually becomes unusable? just look at what happened to browsers, just look at winamp, just look at the toolbars and media players.

    Acrobat Reader has steadily become more and more obese to the point where xpdf is now my default PDF viewer. I'm no big fan of xpdf, but it beats waiting around for Acrobat Reader to load code I will never need.

    but why!? can someone from Adobe please tell me why we need this?

  • A Fully Functional Acrobat Suite is Necessary (Score:3, Interesting)

    by SA Stevens ( 862201 ) on Friday March 25, 2005 @10:58AM (#12046435)
    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.

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