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.'"
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.
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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.
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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.
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What about a Free PDF writer for Windows?
Other than installing OpenOffice.org, I mean...
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FYI to readers: The program *and* the source code are free.
True open source.
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FYI to readers: The program is free, the code is not.
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No until I can get a PDF reader that allows me to add bookmarks to any page to cotinue reading at a later time.
And I would also like the capability to mark part of the pages (even if it is not text but a big image a yellow marker is fine).
But because Free readers exist for most platforms you are Free to add those features if you wish. Doesn't that satisfy the goals of the FSF?
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But because Free readers exist for most platforms you are Free to add those features if you wish.
LOL [slashdot.org]
Thank you, you just reinforced the point I just made in another thread :)
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?
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!
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Most of us have never had a problem with it...except that it required 335 megs of disk space on Windows.
I have a full install of Adobe Reader 7.0 and it takes up less than 80MB.
Perhaps you were thinking of Adobe Acrobat, which is the Adobe software for creating and editing PDF files.
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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.
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Sallie Mae (Score:2)
So, for the first time in several years, I tried ou
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Very few people care anymore about avoiding wasted code, tightening up resources and optimization.
200 Mb is not even bloat anymore.
I bet you can do a Gentoo install with X and xpdf on a 200 Mb partition. (Not counting of course the 1G temporary space for compiling.)
This is why Windows will lose on the netbooks.
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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!
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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:
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If the FOSS readers could just read my PDFs today, I'd be much happier. As it is, I've got four neither Evince nor Xpdf can handle, which leaves me stuck with Adobe Reader.
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Acrobat works ok, I suppose. It is slow to load, but the thing that keeps me from using it is the updates.
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Well, until today I've always installed Foxit on my Windows machines, wanting to have a PDF reader for the odd game manual or so but unwilling to use the attrocious and bloated Adobe Reader. Thanks to this article, however, I've found Sumatra PDF, freeing me from Foxit's ads and cluttered interface so count one convert already.
Perhaps you're right and there are too few F/OSS PDF readers to merit a specific listing of them, but maybe this would give incentive to F/OSS devs to create some more of 'em ;) besid
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Personally, I've never had a problem with Adobe Reader on any platform
I've had awful problems with it in Windows, historically. Hangups, slow to load, annoying default settings, crashes... Since version 9 though, it has become much more usable. Just make sure you turn off the auto update if you don't like to get nagged. :)
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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.
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1. "Reverse engineering software or hardware systems which is done for the purposes of interoperability (for example, to support undocumented file formats or undocumented hardware peripherals) is mostly believed to be legal" -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_engineering [wikipedia.org]
2. But anyway, PDF is published as an international standard - ISO 32000-1:2008 -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Document_Format [wikipedia.org]
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.
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There's a great variation on this: before double-clicking the PDF file you want to open, you hold down 'shift' to have it skip the useless plug-in loading, but you don't notice that another file in the directory was already highlighted - depending on the number of files in the directory, you are now waiting for several dozen instances of Acrobat to load
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That doesn't work on links like I am talking about. The site isn't offering a file, it is calling a plugin. That is like trying to right click on a Flash link or a Javascript link and telling it open it with something else.
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.
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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
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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??
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>> 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
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Really?
Because stupid users are still at the top of my list. If you want to count technological infection vectors then for the last month 1. Windows RPC vulnerability (MS08-67), mostly on home PC's that weren't patched. 2. IE, drive by infections are common, falls victim to viru
Comments (Score:2)
I use evince for almost everything now (but a few years ago it was a pain in the arse)
Unfortunately my supervisor keeps correcting my thesis with comments embedded in the pdf file. No open source reader (that I know of) let me read all of them. That's why I keep an old copy of Acroread 7 (8 is too slow) around.
On a side note, do you know of any open source application that let you _write_ comments on a PDF file?
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Here's an example of one I came across recently: http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r21704795-Browser-Redirect-to-7770-interesting [dslreports.com]
Also at the time I'm writing this, there are at least three PDF droppers listed here: http://www.techzoom.net/security-radar/latest-virus.en [techzoom.net]
Generally tracking things back to the original infection vector is fairly straight forward if it happened recently - there's usually cruft all over the system that wasn't there prior to the infection, and log file entries or application crash me
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...
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IRS tax forms (Score:3, Interesting)
That is the first that comes to mind. Validation on forms. See also: Your IRS 1040
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Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
Why all the buzz? (Score:3, Informative)
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They're promoting other options for software. This can be labeled silly or not so interesting, however I think it's great that there are people passionate about something. And put time and energy in putting up a site listing alternatives.
Actually I think it's a great idea, which could be used for lots of other software categories like word processing, image editing, mail clients et cetera.
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Except that the entire mess with Free Software PDF readers can be laid entirely at the door of the FSF. Here's a brief history:
In the beginning, there was xpdf. It was okay. It displayed PDFs and was quite lightweight. It was released under the FSF's favourite license, the GPL. This was fine, but the UI used a really old toolkit, so people decided they wanted to take the PDF rendering code and put it in something a bit more modern.
The Poppler library was born. Being based on xpdf, it was GPL'd (v2
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.
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.
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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
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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
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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)
In what ways does it being called "the "SchubertIT" plugin" render it not "native"?
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?
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And how many people do you think will bother reading the entire website instead of just the column labeled "Windows"? If you're the type that reads the entire website instead of going straight to the "Download" link, you're the type that needs to know the practical problems of using propietary software but for most people you could probably put "I love child porn!" in there and it wouldn't affect the downloads one bit.
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How ironic that you say that, even though the day before [slashdot.org] there was a story which showed what proprietary software can do to you, your computer, your data and your privacy.
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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
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OO 3.0 actually can import PDFs. It's the only reason I have it installed on my machine.
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Same here, the only current drawback of the OOo import PDF plugin is that you end up with an openoffice draw file (so you can't convert it into a odt AFAIK).
It does allow you to make minor changes, but not being able to open PDFs in Writer does limit the usefulness of this feature. Does anyone know if you can side-step this limitation?
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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.
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Sumatra... format specs? (Score:2)
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.
What?! (Score:2, Funny)
Did I miss something? Isn't PDF still proprietary?
How are Open Source applications interfacing with a proprietary file format and not infringing on the copyrights?
The answer I thought was that they are just readers, so Adobe has aloud decoding, but not encoding. Although, OpenOffice can encode PDFs, so now I'm back to confused. :/
Also, why use a proprietary format like PDF in the first place? Laziness?
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You are possibly confusing it with Flash, where the specification used to be only available for implementing Flash creators, not Flash players.
simple port of Evince or Kpdf and libpoppler... (Score:2)
...is all what's needed. Why dublicate efforts? Even more when both Qt and GTK+ is nicely running in Windows environment (KDE4 is even ported to Win32).
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PDF readers that aren't user-hostile (Score:2)
All of the software on that web page is free. But I wonder how many of them reproduce the obnoxious feature of Acrobat that it won't let you print certain documents - with no way to override that. If I were the FSFE, I would promote only PDF readers that respect the user's rights (as fair use) to make printed copies of documents, and don't replicate the Adobe DRM.
any support for signatures? (Score:2)
Any of them can verify [freedesktop.org] cryptographic signatures?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Bingo!!!! I wish I could mod you up!
We use a thin environment; and even though it is under Linux, we don't want to pull in all of KDE for Ocular, etc. We need tight control over the apps, and prefer ones without "tendrils" into other stuff.
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But sometimes not using FOSS (or open standard file formats) is just plain stupid.
Evidence: WinRAR. What if the company goes tits-up? Can you open your archives in five years (in 64 bit environment)? How about 30 years?
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Two problems: first, Foxit isn't Free Software, which I imagine is a huge problem for the Free Software Foundation Europe. And second, Foxit sucks, not only does it have *ads* (c'mon, even Opera took them out and they were far less annoying), but the interface is a cluttered, incoherent mess and the fact that I still used it until today is only a testament to how pathetically bad Adobe Reader is, not to any quality of Foxit.
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No, most people use Adobe because they don't know they have a choice and many stick with Adobe because rationalising the familiar is easy. For most people, they wouldn't notice if their adobe was replaced by Sumatra or Foxit, which I have recently abandoned for SumatraPDF due to a flashing ad banner, admittedly for foxit's paid product, I wouldn't have minded but if it didn't flash and distract me from what I am doing.
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It probably comes with KDE4 for Windows [kde.org].
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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
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There are a few. They're just all several version out of date feature-wise and crash-prone as hell, AFAIK. (e.g. Gnash.)
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Then they aren't "replacements", are they?
"Replacement" implies that it fits the same bill.
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I just installed Okular. On first start it crashed, the 'Send Message to Microsoft' dialog coming up.
Sumatra can't open Ubuntu PocketGuide [ubuntupocketguide.com] - Just happened to be trying that when I was associating applications after a fresh install the other day - Oh how ironic.
On this form forget Yap.
I like Foxit and VisageSoft [visagesoft.com] ... and PDF-XChange [docu-track.com].
One great feature of Okular is that it allows smooth scrolling, rather than jumping to the top of the next page with no indication you've got to the bottom of the preceeding page