[linux] Adobe Reader 7.0 for Linux entirely bogus?

[Garrett Cooper]

    Although v7.0 looks better, plays nicer with my mouse wheel, and
allows you to fill in PDF forms, etc, I found it to be somewhat kludgy
and in need of improving, s.t. I went back to 5.x.
    xpdf is light and works nicely, and ghostscript's filter features
are nice to deal with of course like Jonathan said. I don't like to use
gpdf for personal reasons, but meh... that's just me.
-Garrett

jnicol at backnine.org wrote:

> Hi Bob,
>
> I haven't tried acroread 7 yet (it's still unstable in Gentoo
> portage). I wrote
> 5 off as crap long ago. Gpdf works fine for me, and xpdf is tolerable
> for non
> Gnome/KDE users. Or you could install ghostscript, and convert all
> your pdfs to
> postscript, or tex, or html...
>
>
> --Jonathan
>
>
> Quoting RL 'Bob' Morgan <rlmorgan at washington.edu>:
>
>>
>> In my job I'm obliged to read lots of PDFs, and have always found the
>> Adobe (Acrobat, mumble, whatever name they pick today) readers to be
>> marginal but still the most likely to work reasonably.  I was excited
>> that
>> they were coming out, at long last with a 7.0 version more or less
>> matching other platforms.  Now that I've used it for a bit I'd have
>> to say
>> that it is the most appallingly horrible piece of software I've ever
>> seen
>> released by a major software house.
>>
>> First of all it uses the everything-in-one-window approach that probably
>> made sense for Windows 3.1 applications but is profoundly suboptimal at
>> this late date.  I have been known to have a dozen or so PDFs open at
>> once, looking at the alongside web pages, word-processing docs, emacs
>> windows, etc, grouping all these things by topic rather than by the app
>> that handles them.  But Reader 7.0 says they all have to be in one
>> window.
>> I guess the way around this is to use the plugin to read these docs
>> in my
>> web browser.  Besides being wasteful of screen space, I have always
>> found
>> this to be the best way to get my browser to crash, so this isn't
>> much of
>> an option.
>>
>> But far worse really is the fact that the program is an unbelievable CPU
>> and memory hog.  I just started it up, opened one document, and waited a
>> few hours.  Now the acroread process appears to be chugging along at 15%
>> CPU (which really sucks when running on battery; did I mention my system
>> is a laptop?) and is up to about 500M in size (so I killed it before it
>> took over completely).  What are these people thinking?
>>
>> So is it just me?  Can they really have put out a package this
>> awful?  Btw
>> I'm running an IBM ThinkPad X31 with 1G memory, and FC3.  I guess
>> I'll go
>> back to 5.10, or look around for other possibilities (I've seen claims
>> that KPDF is good, but I'm not a KDE user).
>>
>>   - RL "Bob"
>