At Sun, 14 Mar 2010 16:36:08 -0700 CentOS mailing list centos@centos.org wrote:
On Sun, Mar 14, 2010 at 4:03 PM, Robert Heller heller@deepsoft.com wrote:
Neither does Adobe Reader! I've envountered PDF files that have been simply malformed on some level. Otherwise it is a matter of how bleeding edge the PDF file is, along with issues like non-embeded non-standard font references (and this includes PDF files supposedly created by Adobe Distiller!). *I* find Adobe Reader's GUI horrible -- I just plain do not like it.
I only have two complaints about AR:
It takes forever to get going - a minute or two at startup - seriously.
I have a pdf that contains savable fill-in form information, and AR
on CentOS refuses to work with it (it start to read the file and quits). eVince can read it, but I can't fill in the form with it. I
The (free!) pdftk package can fill in a PDF file-in form. Not point and click and you need to create a file to drive the fill-in process, generally by 'reverse engineering' the form, but it is doable.
have to use AR on Windoze to work with it. I have complained to Adobe about this, along with the fact that they don't have any decent support for their "free" products, but so far no response (duh - they think that community forums to which I cannot post are sufficient).
Yes, I realize that AR is a free product, but that's no excuse. So are OOo, Mozilla and a whole slew of other, much larger scale products (e.g., CentOS), and yet they all have methods for obtaining support and reporting bugs.
No, it's not worth $600 (or whatever Acrobat costs these days) for me, a broke, individual user trying to scrape by on next to no income (I can't afford the $300 scanner that comes with a free copy of Acrobat, or did, either), but that's no excuse. A good product deserves good support, and ANY software product should have a mechanism for reporting bugs. Period.
Adobe has a niche market of sorts and as long as they can keep that market, they are not really going to change. Of all of the major closed-source 'comodity' software vendors, they are possibly the least obnoxious, but that is not really saying much.
Mark Hull-Richter Expert Linux/C Software Developer Registered Linux User #472807
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