Open Sauce Software
Tasty titbits from people using Linux and other open source software in business.
Tuesday 1 April 2008, 11:49 AM
Meanwhile, PDF is already an ISO document standard...
Last year, Adobe put PDF up to become an ISO standard, something I've been aware of in the back of my mind throughout all the OOXML palaver. Apparently, it was approved in December, as ISO 32000.
Why, I thought to myself, do I have to use Adobe's Acrobat to read PDFs when PDF is an open standard? Acrobat is a huge download, frequently updated, and continually nags to have its latest version installed, usually with free samples of other software that I don't need.
And every so often it breaks and has to be uninstalled, then reinstalled, in order to read documents.
Ironically, enough, one of those times was last week. When I tried to read a PDF, detailing the lastest ODF and OOXML shenanigans, Acrobat Version 8 had a hissy fit, and fell over so completely that the Uninstall tool couldn't remove it, a reinstall wouldn't work, and any accidental click on a PDF would freeze my Firefox so solid only a reboot could get things moving.
Like many other PDF users, I hate Adobe and its Acrobat. This time, the documents it was failing to deliver to me were about struggles to create an open document format.
The irony was enough to push me into a web search I should have done ages go, leading me to Foxit - a shareware PDF reader which is now on my PC.
It's too early to see if this is going to replace Acrobat completely - there's a list of cons on the download page - but the prospect is enough to cheer me on a not-specially jolly day.
And interestingly, I see from the history, that Foxit has been around since at least 2006, so it's not appeared solely because of PDF's ISO standard status.
PreviousComments on this post
The reason why Foxit and hundreds of other PDF software developers out there have been able to build such products is because the PDF specification has been public since the very early versions of the format back in the 1990s.
What is called the "PDF Reference" has been available to download from the Adobe website. It's a pretty big read, but it has everything you need to know about the PDF file structure to be able to create and consume PDF files.
The only difference now is that it's an ISO committee determing the direction of the PDF format, rather than solely Adobe themselves.
Kudos has to go to Adobe for making the PDF spec available to all in the first place -- otherwise us PDF software developers wouldn't be around today!
BTW, I'm from Nitro PDF Software, we build an alternative to Adobe Acrobat called Nitro PDF Professional -> www.nitropdf.com
- Chris.
Peter, while I agree with you in principle about Acrobat Reader, and it is a long, long way from the top of my favorites list, perhaps I can give you a tip that will lessen the pain. I learned a long time ago that browsers were changing so rapidly, and in ways that Adobe apparently keep up with in their plug-in, that I was better off not trying to use the plug-in to read PDF files. This applies equally to IE, Firefox and Opera, in my opinion. The first thing I do when I install Firefox now is go to Tools/Options/Content/File Types/Manage, find the entry for PDF files, then "Change Action" and tell it to open with the default application rather than the plug-in.
As a side note, about hating Adobe and Acrobat, they have been driving me crazy - or perhaps I have been driving the crazy - over the past few months, because Acrobat Standard is one of the utilities that I always keep on my laptop. You may have noticed that I have bounced back and forth between Vista and XP a few times over the past few months... You're supposed to "deactivate" the license on one machine before installing it on another, but that can only be done from within the running copy of the program, and that's kind of hard to do if Vista just ate your system disk... or if your mind is getting to old and weak that you forgot to do it before reloading. So I've had to call and grovel to get them to give me an activation code several times... not my idea of a good time, and it very quickly becomes more trouble than it is worth when the program itself is a royal pain in the rear anyway!
Thanks both.
I see you're both addressing the point of view of PDF producers; I've had the luck so far to only need PDF as a "consumer" of files, reading not writing or converting.
I know there are lots of PDF-related products, and I'm glad to know there is an alternative to Adobe Standard if I ever go that way.
I was slightly surprised that there were so few choices of reader.
