FSFE Launches Free PDF Readers Campaign 198
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.'"
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: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.
Re:Is this useful? (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:
The main functionality that AR has that isn't available in competing open-source plugins is all functionality related to DRM. I get along fine with Evince.
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.
Re:Is this useful? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Is this useful? (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.
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:What? No Foxit? (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:All FOSS PDF Viewers are Outdated (Score:1, Informative)
How many of these require javascript or some other non-FOSS implemented feature? [ctan.org] The fact of the matter is that interactive PDFs are useful. You can essentially use them as a webpage, but everything is in one file and you don't have to worry about the other side, say, missing an obscure font. For example, I'm working on writing a math textbook and being able to include self-marking javascript tests for people to test themselves with would be very cool.
Please stop the FUD (Score:1, Informative)