Slashdot Log In
FSFE Launches Free PDF Readers Campaign
Posted by
kdawson
on Mon Feb 02, 2009 09:37 PM
from the prety-darn-fine dept.
from the prety-darn-fine dept.
FSFE Fellow writes "The Fellowship of the Free Software Foundation Europe is proud to announce its latest initiative: pdfreaders.org, a site providing information about PDF with links to Free Software PDF readers for all major operating systems. FSFE president Georg Greve says: 'Interoperability, competition and choice are primary benefits of Open Standards that translate into vendor-independence and better value for money for customers. Although many versions of PDF offer all these benefits for formatted text and documents, files in PDF formats typically come with information that users need to use a specific product. pdfreaders.org provides an alternative to highlight the strengths of PDF as an Open Standard.'"
Related Stories
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
List in TFA seems to have it covered (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:List in TFA seems to have it covered (Score:4, Insightful)
...so is the Free PDF readers campaign over now?
I would think so, with all the FOSS ones like xPDF and (my favorite) PDF editor. Viewable GPL source code for a PDF reader (and as an added bonus, editor) to me sounds like the end of this campaign. They may not have all the functionality of Acrobat(TM), but they do most of it, contrast OO.o and MSO.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
2) What do you use for your website? Wordpress? Joomla? I dig it, and was just curious.
Offtopic, your sig. (Score:2)
Willing to swap Melbourne weather for any weather from the USA or Siberia.
Are you sure about that? A few days over 40, then back to lovely 30s isn't that bad. I prefer it to 11 straight days over 100f [msn.com] (with plenty over 40c). And certainly over a Siberian winter...
We're better off than Adelaide that's for sure.
Re: (Score:2)
11 straight days over 100F? Hell, we can go 3 straight MONTHS over 100F. Talk to me when you see 11 straight days over 115F.
Re: (Score:2)
What about a Free PDF writer for Windows?
Other than installing OpenOffice.org, I mean...
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Is this useful? (Score:2, Insightful)
Other proprietary alternatives to Adobe's PDF reader also exist, but like it, their internal working is a a trade secret and these programs do not respect your right to control your own privacy and data.
Personally, I've never had a problem with Adobe Reader on any platform, and this site seems to be blatantly against it.
I just don't see the need to have a directory of PDF readers. It's easy enough to Google "open source PDF readers." There just aren't enough of them to justify a directory.
Re:Is this useful? (Score:5, Insightful)
You have never had the "Check for updates?" dialog that Acrobat sometimes raises end up behind the browser, freezing Acrobat and the browser?
Or that it took as much time to load Acrobat from DOS on my 486 as on a modern system?
How about people thinking you need to pay to create PDFs?
Parent
Re:Is this useful? (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally, I've never had a problem with Adobe Reader on any platform
Most of us have never had a problem with it...except that it required 335 megs of disk space on Windows. 1/3 gig just to read and print PDFs? The Linux install needs only 125 megs. Why?
I just don't see the need to have a directory of PDF readers.
Either will average Joe user unless the directory puts a two-page ad [mozilla.org] in the New York Times. The only people who will know about that page are the ones who already use a non-Adobe reader! For Windows I find that Foxit suits my needs and somehow I don't feel guilty about using a proprietary reader(I use the default readers on Linux).
But PDF readers are old news...The only new thing I learned from the site is that there's a -- holy shit! -- KDE on Windows [kde.org] project!
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
7 is pretty old in their release timeline...
I have a 200mb install of 9. There is no reason to have that big of a footprint for something that is meant to view PDFs.
Re: (Score:2)
Personally, I've never had a problem with Adobe Reader on any platform, and this site seems to be blatantly against it.
Uh-oh. You're going to evoke the Nerd Rage(tm) of all the rabid soldiers of the FOSS movement that inhabit /.
Watch out!
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The site is a directory of open-source pdf readers. AR isn't open source.
Even if you don't care about open source, there are serious problems with AR:
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It is blatantly obvious to anyone with two braincells to rub together, that Acrobat Reader on Windows, has become slow, bloated, and prone to lockups.
Fixed that for you. I am guessing the GP is either running Acrobat Reader 5 (or earlier) or opens like 3 PDF's a year.
Re:Is this useful? (Score:5, Informative)
Oh?
From Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]
PDF is an open standard that was officially published on July 1, 2008 by the ISO as ISO 32000-1:2008.
This isn't the same as DeCSS cracking CSS or OpenOffice cracking the .doc format.
Parent
Fix sites! (Score:5, Insightful)
Now if we could just get all websites to stop depending on the damn Acrobat Reader plugin. I kid you not- I have had to fight several sites we must use at work that, instead of just offering links to necessary PDF files, they check "to make sure you have the Acrobat Plugin installed" and pull some type of plugin call. Extremely annoying. Why not just point the damn link at the PDF file and let the browser decide how to handle it!!!!! Most of us *hate* the Acrobat Reader plugin, we don't WANT to have to look at a PDF file embedded into the web browser.... it is slower, less flexible, doesn't offer all the controls, often doesn't free memory after you close that "page", and doesn't allow us to use some other reader.
And if I had a dollar for every site that claims I *MUST* have Adobe Acrobat Reader in order to look at a damn PDF file, I would be rich.
Highlight security instead (Score:5, Interesting)
Pretty much every virus infected PC I've seen in the past few months was originally infected via the magnificence that is Acrobat Reader (and most of the remainder were infected by the meth-using-crack-whore that is the Sun JRE)
The time is right to go after Acrobat. After explaining to someone that the virus that just trashed their PC (or office's PCs) came in by way of a hidden PDF in an infected web page, not only are they OK with removing the Acrobat browser plugins, but they're often open to getting Acrobat off the machine entirely.
Given the rash of shit that Microsoft has (rightfully) received over the years for browser exploits, it's time to hold Adobe and Sun accountable for their dangerously insecure products. Both companies patch management is terrible. Neither provide any decent support for sysadmins to push out updates ("uh, try to find the MSI that the installer drops and then, you know, push it out with something. I think you can do it with Group Policies!" is about as far as they go) For Java it's been easy to say "just get rid of it" since for 99% of people it's unnecessary, but Acrobat and Acrobat Reader have been more of a challenge. Perhaps highlighting how insecure Acrobat is will help move the effort to replace it along.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Pretty much every virus infected PC I've seen in the past few months was originally infected via the magnificence that is Acrobat Reader ... by way of a hidden PDF in an infected web page.
That's spot-on. I'm like much of the Slashdot crowd (or so I suppose): using the Internet since well before the turn of the millenium, tried all kinds of OSs, a bit of a hardware geek, etc. Yet I was casually surfing along with my work laptop (yay, with McAfee Enterprise)on some humor/satire related website when everything in my browser froze up. The moment the browser recovered, I was told there was an error in acrobat.exe; the next three minutes were a blur of virus/trojans/backdoor alerts from McAfee
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Pretty much every virus infected PC I've seen in the past few months was originally infected via the magnificence that is Acrobat Reader (and most of the remainder were infected by the meth-using-crack-whore that is the Sun JRE)
The time is right to go after Acrobat. After explaining to someone that the virus that just trashed their PC (or office's PCs) came in by way of a hidden PDF in an infected web page, not only are they OK with removing the Acrobat browser plugins, but they're often open to getting Acrobat off the machine entirely.
Given the rash of shit that Microsoft has (rightfully) received over the years for browser exploits, it's time to hold Adobe and Sun accountable for their dangerously insecure products. Both companies patch management is terrible. Neither provide any decent support for sysadmins to push out updates ("uh, try to find the MSI that the installer drops and then, you know, push it out with something. I think you can do it with Group Policies!" is about as far as they go) For Java it's been easy to say "just get rid of it" since for 99% of people it's unnecessary, but Acrobat and Acrobat Reader have been more of a challenge. Perhaps highlighting how insecure Acrobat is will help move the effort to replace it along.
What version of Sun JRE was running? I haven't heard of any viruses with Sun Java in years.
So what did Adobe and Sun say when you reported the problem??
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
>> it's time to hold Adobe and Sun accountable for their dangerously insecure products
>> Neither provide any decent support for sysadmins to push out updates
Correct. It's stupid that the JRE tries to autoupdate by default on startup, annoying users that just use it for executing some REAL application... In the other side, the last week I tried to use the Adobe flash 10 plugin inside an intranet (without internet access, by first installing the last plugin .EXE) and IE simply crashed on the firs
All FOSS PDF Viewers are Outdated (Score:3, Insightful)
As someone who really loves to play around with LaTeX, it really irritates me when features in my document can't be seen and tested in anything other than Adobe. There are so many neat things out there (like PDF javascript) but they're just not implemented... It's sad...
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
IRS tax forms (Score:3, Interesting)
That is the first that comes to mind. Validation on forms. See also: Your IRS 1040
Why all the buzz? (Score:3, Informative)
Try using DJVU (Score:5, Informative)
It often produces much smaller compressed files (typically about half the size of a PDF), and there are open source viewers for many platforms. It has plenty of support for annotations, OCR, internal links etc just like PDF, and you can extract the parts and structure of a Djvu document in XML with command line tools and modify them easily.
It's also very easy to cut a Djvu document into individual pages, which lets you publish big documents on websites so that users only need to download the actual pages that they are interested in reading (eg if they want to preview the file without downloading the whole thing). This saves bandwidth, user waiting time, etc.
Last but not least, the Djview viewer renders pages much faster than Acrobat or Xpdf in my experience - so much faster that I regularly get annoyed at the sloness of flipping pages in PDF format. The first thing I do with any paper in PDF format is to convert it using pdf2djvu.
Re:Try using DJVU (Score:4, Insightful)
Who's annoying whom? Personally, I wouldn't bother with the commercial software you linked to, as Debian has plenty of free tools for handling PDF files already, but if you feel it's worth bringing to slashdotters' attention, great!
The point of Djvu is that it's technically slightly better than PDF for digital document storage and viewing, and since it's free(libre) (<= note relevance to TFA), people who want a small competitive advantage can try it out without risk, now or in ten years or whenever. I happen to like it (not that I'm anyone special), but so do various libraries which tend to think in longer terms than the next year. And of course, the format was developed at AT&T Labs to address digital archiving problems.
BTW, you don't need to keep all your documents in the format you receive them just so other people can read them. That kind of thinking will just make you buy useless copies of Microsoft Office and whatnot, on the off chance that someone else can't find the import command. Always use the best tool for the job, and convert your work to something basic when you need to interoperate.
Parent
PDF Reader on Mac OS X? (Score:4, Interesting)
Unless you haven't used a (somewhat recent) Mac recently, you'd know that you don't need a PDF reader on Mac OS X. The OS itself can open, print and print to PDF directly.
On OS X 10.5, if I press [Space] while I have a PDF document selected in Finder it displays it nearly instantly.
So unless I'm missing something obvious, installing a PDF reader on Mac OS X seems pointless to me.
Re: (Score:2)
I did my taxes today on my Mac. Filled my 1040 in Preview. Worked great. Saved and everything. Until I entered my bank info. It seems that the 1040 uses some text spacing feature that Preview doesn't support.
So . . . I fired up Acrobat and re-did the whole thing. (Acrobat couldn't save the PDF once it was edited in Preview. Once I figure out the labyrinthine Apple bug reporting system I'll report both of these problems.)
Right or wrong, people only check their documents with Acrobat. It is the de fac
Re: (Score:2)
I read a lot of PDF files on my Mac and work and it has been my experience that the "native" PDF plugin (which really isn't, in older versions of the OS it was called the "SchubertIT" plugin) is inferior to Acrobat's reader (I believe I am using version 7-8, not at work so can't check.) Also using X 10.4 so maybe it's better in 10.5.
On my iMac (one of the last PowerPC models shipped) the Adobe version is faster, renders text and documents more accurately and more quickly, and is more accurate when selectin
FOSS FUD? (Score:5, Interesting)
Other proprietary alternatives to Adobe's PDF reader also exist, but like it, their internal working is a a trade secret and these programs do not respect your right to control your own privacy and data.
A tad melodramatic, isn't it? Ooh, scary secret internal workings... I don't think this is going to increase adoption rates of FOSS PDF readers one bit, and for one simple reason.
No one cares. Sure, maybe a few people do, but the VAST majority of people really couldn't care less if their PDF reader is free as in speech, so long as its free as in beer. They're gonna google "free pdf reader", find Adobe's and use that. Or, if they really don't like Adobe (who could blame them?), they'll see Foxit next on the list, and use that.
If you want to get people to switch, you need your product to be substantially superior in terms of features, not philosophy. Packaging it with something people already have would also be a good method. If there was a PDF reader good enough to be packaged with OOo, that'd be a start.
*Yeah, I know I'll probably get modded down for daring to use FOSS and FUD in the same breath, but come on! That description was so over the top*
Re:FOSS FUD? (Score:4, Interesting)
See Spazimodo's comment above for the security risks involved in using Adobe's proprietary comment.
The argument you're making - that ppl will switch for pragmatic rather than philosophical reasons - is an old one. The free software community will counter with the argument that their philosophical reasons are entirely pragmatic. Ours is simply more long term pragmatic thinking. The benefits of the founding of the Free Software Foundation 25 years ago are increasingly showing manifest benefits today. Why do you have an issue with people expressing broader and longer term thinking?
Parent
Who cares about readers? How about editors? (Score:2)
We've had free (and Free) PDF readers covered for years.
But what about PDF editors? And I don't mean things like OpenOffice that can output its native format into PDF outputs (but can't open the PDFs and edit them) or any similar program on Mac OS X able to print anything to PDF. I mean something that can open and edit a PDF file generated by some other tool where you don't have the original source (or there is none in the case of a scanner scanning to PDF). I mean Adobe Acrobat replacements. Not Acroba
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
FOSS needs to offer at the very least parity with closed source in terms of usability if it's going to get anywhere. Firefox didn't get to where it's at by simply being libre, it got there by offering a better user experience
Meh... (Score:2)
I download Adobe Reader for Linux because some documents can only be seen like they were meant to be seen in it. But I avoid using the .tar.gz installer script: I usually download the .deb, unpack it manually instead of installing it and copy the folder to the /opt limbo. Then I use it only when I really really need it. I don't even bother in creating a link to the binary in /usr/local/bin or something. I keep it hard to use.
Why? Not because it's proprietary, not because I'm a FOSS zealot. Just because it's
Regarding "Check for updates" in Adobe Reader (Score:4, Informative)
Whenever the Adobe Reader (or Acrobat Pro for that matter) is brought into a Slashdot discussion, people invaribaly mention the fact that it insists on checking for updates, which is completely true. It's a pain, and some people also use it as an example of what they hate about Windows.
However, what I'm more surprised about is that a bunch of geeks aren't capable of exploring the options of the update applet:
* Run Adobe Reader/Acrobat Pro, click Help menu -> Check for updates...
* Let it perform a scan, then regardless of whether it found anything to update or not, click Preferences when it appears, and uncheck the "Automatically check for Adobe updates" checkbox.
* Click OK, let it scan again for some reason, then hit Quit. Now it will never bother you again.
Now of course, the default should be for updates to NOT be automatically installed. If necessary it should perform scans by default, but have the update notification unobtrusive, like a little icon in the main GUI for example.
Anyway, I provide these instructions because even though we're supposedly a site full of high-intellect individuals, I continually see this complaint and wonder why people can't just try to solve the problem themselves, either through poking with the options like every geek should (it's fun to explore stuff, isn't it?), or simply Googling for an answer.
xpdf on Linux Adobe's (Score:3, Informative)
I prefer free software most of the time anyway, but it is astounding how bad Adobe's Acrobat Reader has become.
On Linux, I now use /usr/bin/xpdf on all PDFs by default: it's ugly, but it is incredibly fast to open, and has worked for every document so far.
On Mac OS X, I continue to be impressed with how good the built-in Preview app really is. I've never had a reason to use anything else.
Acrobat Reader 7 on Solaris was so bulky, slow, and full of Annoying Flashy Ads (TM), that I actually kept around an older version (5.0.9) of acroread in order to have better performance and a less irritating GUI.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, no Foxit because Foxit isn't Free-with-a-capital-F. The entire reason the website was created was so that people could use free readers.
For me, I've never had Sumatra ever properly read a PDF file. I use Foxit on windows myself, but would rather use a free reader if I had to.
Re: (Score:2)
For me, I've never had Sumatra ever properly read a PDF file. I use Foxit on windows myself, but would rather use a free reader if I had to.
You too? I didn't want to mention it, as the tone of my post was already fairly negative.
I'm definitely going to look into Okular.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Foxit is not FOSS. The site is dedicated to FOSS. Foxit is, however, nice... too bad it isn't multi-platform.
Re:What? No Foxit? (Score:4, Funny)
Linux and OSX seem to have decent free PDF readers. It's only Windows that is lacking.
But yes, it does have a nice interface and presentation.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Linux and OSX seem to have decent free PDF readers. It's only Windows that is lacking.
Only if you pretend that readers like Foxit (and a few other lesser-known ones) don't exist. Given the choice between Foxit and having to install KDE for Windows to run Ocular (good grief, how can PDFReaders.org even list that as a serious proposition?) I'll take Foxit any day. Sadly, it seems to be slowly succumbing to the Acrobat bloat effect, but it's still generally usable.
Re: (Score:2)
Why the bloody hell are these programs so dammed huge?!
That is about a penny of disk space. (Score:2)
Disk space is dirt cheap. That is less than a penny of disk space. Looking over my Reader directory, there is about 32 megs of localization resources. 2 megs of fonts. 40 megs of plugins. 102 megs of setup files so you can repair/change the installation. The actual core binaries seem to be under 5 megs.
There is probably a good reason these are so large anyway--developer time is vastly more expensive than disk space and PDF is a pretty complex beast.
Is it really worth spending months to create more britt
Re: (Score:2)
There are a few. They're just all several version out of date feature-wise and crash-prone as hell, AFAIK. (e.g. Gnash.)