Thank you for the 64bit beta of the Flash player, it's starting to work better. Thank you too for the just released 9.40 version of Reader. But unfortunately it didn't put a smile on my face; the lack of 64bit support for Reader is absolutely making server upgrades miserable. As you can see from the message below, there is no ETA on making 32bit Reader work on 64bit Firefox 4.0. The Mozilla developers don't have the resources to debug it, nor should they have to. Your help in this matter is appreciated.
Disclaimer: Yup, I know about the open source readers...they aren't robust enough to use at this time.
12 comments:
it's good that Adobe is reading your blog, otherwise this will be never fixed!
Define "not robust enough to use"?
When you say "robust", I think "stability", which seems very much like a property more applicable to the Open Source alternatives than to Adobe's PDF reader.
Or, do you mean that some types of content don't display correctly in the Open Source alternatives? If so, can you enumerate some of these, so that we can file bugs about them?
"not robust enough to use"
You must be kidding. Either that, or you're talking about an application that can be confused with Adobe Acrobat Reader.
What? Evince is not good enough?
I'm sure the evince devs will appreciate being handed any document exposing any bug
Uhm, Evince is *way* better than Adobe reader.
So please stop complaining about how crap Adobe's software is on Planet Gnome, we don't care.
@all:
It should be obvious that I don't expect my blog to speed up anything from Adobe. But I do know they read blogs, they have already responded at times directly in my comments. They won't know what we need unless we ask for it.
Concerning Evince: Read my earlier blogs, look at the new helper bars that I have for PDF fles. On this next desktop upgrade I'm offering evince for the first time for people that want to open simple documents quickly. I love evince. But at this time it's not even close to being a drop-in replacement for Acrobat Reader. For that to happen it will have to support 100 percent of the features, and with 1000 users on our network...every one of them rears their ugly head. Evince will have to fully render all forms, including entry widgets perfectly. It also will have to fully support displaying 3D engineering models that are embedded inside a PDF. Yup, we are getting them. Adobe Reader allows you to click on the 3D model and rotate it with your mouse. All of these features should NEVER have been put into Acrobat Reader...but those documents are in the wild and need to be supported.
If we deploy something that is missing features, the people that are on a constant witch hunt to get a PC with Microsoft Windows will be on us instantly.
http://www.bentley.com/en-us/products/microstation/interactive+3d+pdf.htm
For anyone interested in PDF nasties, check out that link.
Yeah, from time to time Evince just do not cut it. Remember about a year back when I wanted to print a ticket with a barcode. The ticket printed fine, but the barcode had for some rason a red blur (only on print, not on screen) I had to quickly install adobe reader to be able to be able to use that ticket that same day. This seems to be fixed nowdays, but since then I always have adobe reader installed. Not as my preferred choice but as a backup when Evince does not cut it.
I think we can all agree that PDF has been extended too far. The Bentley example scares me the most: I am getting security warnings, and the signature is not valid. Additionally, Adobe PDF vulnerabilities have been off the chart this year. Some have suggested that Adobe accounts for 80% or more of all intrusion vectors, while Adobe seems uninterested in fixing them and keeps extending the PDF spec. In my group security comes before accessibility.
That said, I prefer Okular over Evince.
Okular and Evince share the same backend... thus preferring over another is only a matter of what desktop you preffer using.
I really love Evince, in fact it was one of the programs that sold me on Gnome -- it's simple, it's elegant. But Evince struggles with lots of PDF's, even some that Okular displays correctly. So, right now, Evince is my standard PDF reader, but I've got Adobe Reader and Okular installed, too.
@Topic: Are people really so keen on having the whole mess of Adobe Reader in their browsers? I have for years now, always deactivated the Adobe Reader plug-in and am pretty happy with that (after all, PDF reading is not integrated into the browsing experience at all).
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