At Sun, 14 Mar 2010 16:36:08 -0700 CentOS mailing list <centos at centos.org> wrote: > > On Sun, Mar 14, 2010 at 4:03 PM, Robert Heller <heller at deepsoft.com> wrote: > > > > Neither does Adobe Reader! Â I've envountered PDF files that have been > > simply malformed on some level. Â 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!). Â *I* find Adobe Reader's GUI horrible -- I > > just plain do not like it. > > > > I only have two complaints about AR: > > 1) It takes forever to get going - a minute or two at startup - seriously. > > 2) 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 > - sign up at http://counter.li.org/ > _______________________________________________ > CentOS mailing list > CentOS at centos.org > http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos > > -- Robert Heller -- Get the Deepwoods Software FireFox Toolbar! Deepwoods Software -- Linux Installation and Administration http://www.deepsoft.com/ -- Web Hosting, with CGI and Database heller at deepsoft.com -- Contract Programming: C/C++, Tcl/Tk