I have no idea how it got there in the first place. Yes, I know about Foxit Reader. For the record, I declined and uninstalled it (which required a reboot, argh). The plugin installer license-agreement thingie was quite apoplectic about it, too. Declining, I mean. Have you ever had the feeling that you’re suddenly venturing into a code path that has only ever been tested by disgruntled interns?
> DECLINE LICENSE Um, are you sure? > YES Like, really really sure? > YES You are whisked away to a dusty code path. Path Without User Consent > LOOK The path goes nowhere. There are no exits. You see a disgruntled intern here. > EXAMINE INTERN The intern looks weary, as if crushed by the weight of a thousand shattered dreams. > GO WEST You can't go that way. > GO EAST You can't go that way. > GO NORTH You can't go that way. > GO SOUTH You can't go that way. > INTERN, MAKE ME A SANDWICH The intern sighs and shrugs his shoulders. > WAIT Time passes. It is getting dark. You are likely to be eaten by a competitor.
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Deliciously funny :) Thanks!
— Karim 
It’s no secret that each successive version of Acrobat accretes even more bloat than the previous one, scarcely conceivable as it may be. Think of it as a form of software comedy, with priceless jokes like the updated version check plugin that causes Acrobat to crash on startup (on the Mac). As soon as Leopard stabilizes enough for me to install it on my primary desktop machine, I will uninstall this steaming pile of offal from my systems.
— Fazal Majid
I’ve switched to using Evince for all but the most proprietary of PDF uses. When I have to use Acrobat, I wonder what I have done to warrant such punishment, much like a town during a drought. I have not, as of yet sacrificed anything to try to please the mystical beings, but it just might come to that.
You should try using “sudo” on the intern.
I want to know who gets the commission on reboots!
Fair enough. Users don’t read EULAs, publishers don’t read EULAs.
What you don’t see is the rest of the CSS…
body
{
text-transform: uppercase;
font-size: 4pt;
}
That’s so it will look like a normal EULA and insure it can not be read by anybody.
The best part is the DOCTYPE spec, “(View source for full doctype…)”. I’m pretty
sure that’s not valid. Not to mention the content-type of text/html rather than
application/xhtml+xml. But then again, why is there any reason at all for it not
to be text/plain ? Not everything has to be XML.
Perhaps opponents of Acrobat could point us to at least one open-source PDF viewer, complete with annotation and other PDF-creation features, that works with screen readers, does more with tagged PDFs than untagged, and can turn a PDF from untagged into tagged.
Open-source software is better, isn’t it?
The first time I used OS X’s Preview and realized that a PDF Reader could be fast and light was the last time I used Adobe Acrobat Reader.
— Markus Arike
This is pathetic… Adobe should be ashamed when geeks laugh about their incompetence IN SUCH A BASIC AREA!
— she
> ATTACK TROLL WITH SWORD
Joe Clark deftly deflects your parry.
— Mark
Joe: This post is about Adobe Reader 8.0, the cost-nothing-but-your-freedom PDF viewer, not Adobe Acrobat, which is the pay-money-and-your-freedom-for product that allows PDF creation and editing.
— James
Agh. I too have discovered the beauty of Preview on the Mac. It renders text better than Adobe Acrobat Professional too! Yes, I have tried tweaking the settings. Acrobat looks awful. Preview looks fine.
And why does Acrobat take so long to distill files to PDF? I tried Open Office and it did the same thing in fractions of a second. In fact it was so fast I thought it hadn’t worked. (Of course I know there’s a million things only Acrobat can do.)
At home I am having problems after viewing PDFs in Acrobat 8.1.1. AdobeUpdater.exe loads and takes up to 99% of my CPU! This causes the whole machine to run slowly. I try killing it using CTRL + ALT + DEL but it won’t die. Only reboot is the cure. So thanks for the link to another PDF viewer Mark, I’m gonna try that and uninstall Adobe’s bloated buggy reader.
Now a plea. Can you save your images with less compression Mark? They are quite messy. In these days of broadband we don’t have to fret so much about every single byte saved. Using PNGs or GIFs for screenshots helps.
And what are you doing using Windows anyway? :-)
In answer to Joe’s question, OpenOffice has had an ‘Export As .pdf’ icon on the toolbar since at least v1.1, which I used for printing assignments on the Macs at university for the rare occasions when Rich Text wasn’t inter-operable enough for my needs, and I hear that Word finally got something similar recently. Not being able to actually READ .pdf files as well is a bit of a nuisance, but either program probably has enough functionality for the majority of home and business users.
— Jake
Yeah, sorry about the crappy screenshot. I realized after publishing it that I should have used a PNG. But by then I’d already uninstalled Reader, and I wasn’t about to reinstall it just to recapture the error message.
— Mark
So when did you switch from Debian/Ratpoison to Windows? Should I unsub your blog now?
As the related-articles section mentioned tax forms, it reminded me that the last time I used Acrobat was to fill in my tax forms for 2006. Now that evince has gotten forms support (as of version 2.20.0, I think), I can finally do my taxes without firing up my VM.
Uninstalled Acrobat Reader at home last night. The bastard required a reboot just to uninstall! How bad is that! I have now installed Foxit. So far (one day’s usage) it seems pretty good. It has a lot of commands Acrobat does. The installation is also painless (extremely quick!).
Update: I just had to update Reader to the latest version for something, and either the bug only affects the XP version (I’m on 2000 Pro planning to switch to Ubuntu) or Adobe have quietly fixed it and are hoping nobody noticed.
— Jake
More reasons to dislike Adobe PDFs:
“Yahoo to put adverts in PDF files”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/-/1/hi/business/7118363.stm
“Yahoo has reached a deal to start running advertisements in Adobe’s popular PDF document-reading format.
The service will allow publishers to make money by including adverts linked to the content of a PDF document in a panel at the side of the page.”
> xyzzy!
you are promptly dumped back at a recovery console. exits are at the AC mains source.
— victor marks
Good read. :)
— Matt
Funny :-)
I enjoy reading about incompetance like this, makes me feel better about my own efforts!
Joe,
In answer to your question - Free Software implementations of PDF are lacking a little, but the Free Software Foundation recognises this fact has made the development of ‘GNU PDF’ a high priority.
Please consider making a donation to this project today, if you’d like to see it succeed:-
https://www.fsf.org/donate/directed-donations/gnupdf.html
Best,
matt
— Matt Lee
Isn’t it delicious? All of those Linux users and their open source. They think they’re sooooo safe and secure. But, what’s this? Shiny magic applications that do stuff?
Nvidia drivers, from nvidia’s site, Flash plugin, Adobe Reader, RealPlayer, Picasa, ETC.
Gotta have it, gotta use it, everyone does, why can’t I? Do you know how many closed projects have remote exploits (backdoors) inserted on purpose? I won’t name any particulars here.
The majority of computer users are stupid, mindless sheep.
They are the ones whose eyes will glaze over with delight when they fondle the next Wintendo offering in the stores.
They are the same who when asked what kind of computer they have respond “Windows”.
These are the people who are nothing more than virtual nipples to be milked for money and spread the dark philosophies coming from the Electronic Mordor.
Chains fall upon us all by the rule of big corporate devils because of the permissiveness of the mass public.
In time if this idiocy continues, all open source will be illegal at the whim of corporation number one with the votes in the politicians pockets.
Lovers of open source need to make their voices heard peacefully before it’s too late.
Open source hippies they call some of us, failing to realise that the hippy culture served to stir more action and thought than much of the current generations of pale skinned, overweight, ipod clutching couch lizards who whine if they’re not in an air conditioned environment and forced to walk further than a block for anything.
Attack my spelling, grammar, abuse of the Enter key, what have you, but you know deep down in your soul that I am right, and because of this you will either ignore this post, or attack it.
— Mutant
matt: The GNUpdf project is GPLv3 and therefore license incompatible with KDE, so I won’t be making use of it anytime soon. It also looks like a nice way of reinventing the wheel. There’s already xpdf and the poppler library based on it, both of which predate the GNUpdf project by quite a bit and support most of the day-to-day PDF usage - it’s not as though there’s a shortage of decent PDF viewers based on poppler/xpdf.
(Incidentally, I see gnash is now GPLv3 too, which means that I’m probably safer using the closed-source version of Flash from a license point of view. I really wish they wouldn’t do that.)
— makomk
makomk: Not that I understand your dislike of GLPv3, but Swfdec http://swfdec.freedesktop.org/wiki/ is LGPL v2.1 or later and plays YouTube.
— James
Mutant: Gotta have it, gotta use it, everyone does, why can’t I? Do you know how many closed projects have remote exploits (backdoors) inserted on purpose? I won’t name any particulars here.
As we’re talking about closed-source end-user software for Linux such as nVidia drivers, flashplugin, acrobat and so on, could you name some of those which have been revealed to have backdoors (which are not the same as remote exploits; security holes are the result of sloppy coding, while backdoors are maliciously and intentionall installed)? Three examples should do.
James: most of the non-GNU projects out there are still GPLv2, and there are all sorts of interesting license issues with combining (L)GPLv2 and (L)GPLv3. In particular, KDE is built around the GPLv2-only Qt library.
(Actually, I’m pretty sure that, if you build Gnash with its KDE GUI, you now end up with something that can’t be legally distributed. The FSF have used legal threats before against the distribution of source code under a non-GPLv2 license that is intended to be linked against GPLv2 libraries, but I think it’s legal, if a bit morally iffy.)
swfdec looks interesting, thanks! I knew there were other open source SWF implementations, most of which have been abandoned, but this one looks to actually be under active development (though probably not quite as active as gnash).
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© 2001–8 Mark Pilgrim