An application for reading PortableDocumentFormat files. Despite what Adobe might want you to think (and encourage by getting websites to display AdobeAcrobatReader download icons anywhere PDF files are available for download), it's not the only PDF viewing app.
Moved from PdfSucks...
- It leaves a large ghost process in memory after exiting and you must use End Process in the task manager to remove it
- The AdobeAcrobatReader is slow (BloatWare) on older machines.
- Many WindowsUsers? find the AdobeAcrobatReader UserInterface awkward.
- Text is often blurry or oddly "pixellated"
- The Acrobat plugin can cause a browser crash. Adobe Reader 6.0 is so bad in this respect that I would recommend not installing the plugin.
- Acrobat forms can execute client-side JavaScript. [http://partners.adobe.com/asn/acrobat/forms.jsp] Any bets on whether the code is running in a sandbox?
In what ways is the AdobeAcrobatReader UserInterface considered awkward?
- When it first pops up, you can't select text. There's a goofy little hand to move the page up and down that I don't need because I have a mouse wheel. To select text I have to click on the "T with a little square next to it" icon or press the "V" key. Your monitor is wide enough, apparently, that you've never needed to scroll sideways. Not true for everybody. Certainly not after zooming in. ''The hand tool is one of the most useful things that Adobe has contributed to UI design in my opinion. I wish more Windows and Linux apps would incorporate it."
- If the page has more than one column text selection is difficult. The normal text selection tool spans columns and the special column select tool ignores words on the ends of lines if they fall outside the selection rectangle.
- When you copy selected text, opening inverted comma (double or single) is captured as a different character, such as '/'. Similarly, 'fi' or 'ffi' may be captured as a single character, such as "_". Also, italic or bold emphasis is lost. That's because ffi or fi actually is a single character. It's known as a ligature, other examples would be ae, fl, and possibly st. So it sucks because it doesn't have the option to convert the "ffi" ligature to "ffi" characters on capture.
- There's a "Find" icon and a "Search" icon next to each other. They both have binoculars but one has a page under the binoculars. In all the years I've used it I have no clue what "Search" is good for. Or was it "Find"?
- For a tool that only displays data it has amazingly sluggish response. It doesn't scroll over a pre-rendered bitmap but calculates each page as it is displayed. That's pointless since I can't edit the data. That's what PDF is. It's a Turing-complete display language. Storing every page as a bitmap would increase file size dramatically - which is what a PDF that was made by a scanner with no OCR actually does! Compare that to one made from a word document, some time, for file size. The writer meant why not prerender a page from PDF code into a bitmap and then scroll the bitmap, not store bitmaps in the PDF file! PDF is not Turing-complete. Postscript is.
- Reading text on-screen is awkward. Acrobat is page-oriented, which is fine for print, but makes for lots of scrolling, both vertical (blech) and horizontal (triple blech!). (discussion below)
- To make text legible one has to increase the magnification, which means you see less, and have to scroll more. Depends on your monitor.
- Vertical scrolling is never smooth, and may be horribly jerky for rapid scrolling. Try viewing ftp://publications.ai.mit.edu/ai-publications/pdf/AIM-378.pdf and then keep the cursor down key pressed for an awful "flashing text" effect. The scrolling looks fine on that document to me (iMac, MacOs 10.2, Acrobat 5.0) [Well, the flashing occurred on a 200MHz PC - it might be okay on a fast iMac.] To be fair, that document is scanned, so every page is a bitmap. Hardly a representative example. Scrolling down a bitmap should not flash on a 200Mhz PC. Every PDF document is rendered to a bitmap before being displayed. A scanned document should display faster than a composed document. [On a 1GHz PC (with a better graphics card), it was jerky, but didn't exhibit the "flashing text" phenomenon.]
Mmm. The Acrobat Reader I know has only a "Find" icon and menu option. It also doesn't seem sluggish at all. Of course, I have only used it for smaller documents such as my 151 page thesis and some >1000pages software manuals...
Version? Acrobat 5.1 has both (and also keeps referring to Acrobat 5.0).
Find is used to locate a word within a single Acrobat document; Search is used to perform a boolean search within an Index (see Building an Index below) of collected Acrobat documents.
As of version 7 or something, there now exist editable PDF forms. And of course, what Adobe invents, people will slavishly follow, so these forms are starting to crop up on websites when there exists the need for a form for you to print out, fill out and mail off somewhere. (What was wrong with plain old HTML? Nothing.)
But of course, this is a version 7 thing. So I had to upgrade the AdobeAcrobatReader on my WindowsNinetyEight box, because I only had version 5 installed. And can I? No. Adobe won't let Win98 users go past v6. So unless I upgrade my entire operating system, I can't use forms on some websites. How hateful.
Related:
CategorySoftwareTool
Adobe Acrobat Reader