Why must I use Adobe Acrobat when it is such a bloated, slow, piece of shit software?!?! And this is only to produce a downloadable form for our website! I need to find an open-source equivalent for PDF editing–PDFCreator works for one-off PDF creation, but not forms.
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Adobe is the suck! I hate, hate, hate it. But I don’t hate PDF. I love PDF for 3 reasons:
1) I can read it on any platform
2) (since I use OS X) I don’t need to use AcroReader to view PDFs
3) (again since I use OS X) when I print I can print and create a PDF file instead of sending the output to a printer.
No disagreement on any of those points. PDF format good, Adobe products not so good. And, I can do the same thing on Windows you can do on OS X.
I like how Adobe Acrobat often leaves a miserable memory intensive program running after you close the application. It’s called AcroUD70_fucktheuser.exe or something. I’ve found 4-5 instances of this running after all instances of the reader have been closed.
I am not sure why, but PDFs always crash my browser. Sometimes it’s the first one I open that causes it to hang and hang and hang and eventually crash, and sometimes it’s the third or fourth one. I HATE pdfs. It makes me even more irritable when there is NO reason for something to be a PDF when it’s just the equivalent of a static webpage. I get the point of forms, and I get the point of scanning an already created document that you don’t want to have to markup just to put it on the web, but generally, if it’s in PDF form I’m going to have to be really sure it’s worth it before I click on it. I must be doing something wrong… though what exactly I am doing wrong, I cannot figure out.
By the way, getting to preview your comment without having to click something and load a preview is the bomb. I totally need to recruit you to help me redesign my photoblog someday.
My experiences with pdf is exactly as Seadragon describes. I especially hate it when I click on something that I don’t know is a PDF. I know that my browser will either crash or that it will take forever to open it - usually I go to the bathroom and sometimes it will be open when I get back, and sometimes it won’t be. I wish there was some way to get this message out there that pdf files suck, suck, suck.
tfg: I like the crap that Adobe slaps into your Startup folder. Adobe Assistant: WTF is that and why is it there?!?!?! It is supposed to make Adobe start faster. My ass.
seadragon and epiph: I have found a couple of small workarounds for the clicking on a PDF and waiting problem. One of the things that is cool is someone has made an extension called PDF Download. I use it, and it helps with the problem Firefox has.
The other problem–speed of loading PDFs within/without the browser is mainly a problem of Adobe Acrobat. The darn thing has so many plugins, it just takes darn near forever. I found a free alternative PDF Reader for Windows called Foxit Reader. This thing is darn quick, and it opens up PDF files in a jiffy.
Installing both of these tools on your machine will help immensely with the PDF problem you guys experience.
As for my live comment preview, seadragon, I cannot take credit for that. The theme in use here incorporates a couple of AJAX-y elements I really like. One of the reasons I think WordPress is the bomb!
Thanks for those links. I will definitely check them out!
And as for WordPress, when it first came out I pooh-poohed it as a cheap version of MT. But it sounds like it is actually a lot better than MT from the people who use it. I guess that’s another thing I need to look into!
Jason,
Does Windows do all that out of the box or do you need to install extra software?
Paul:
On the PDF reading and creation front, no. They all require some application be installed. PDFCreator essentially wraps a Windows version of the venerable open source GhostScript. FoxIt Reader is just an executable, which is quite nice–drop it on your machine and go.
In theory, there will be a PDF competitor in the next Windows/Office version, but I will believe it when I see it.
Thanks for that info Jason. I think I need to add those tools to my girlfriend’s Dell.
Glad I could help, Paul. A little hint on the FoxIt Reader: slap it in its own directory in C:\Program Files\Foxit Reader. Make it the default app for opening PDFs, and then you are all set.
Breaking a Broken Tool: Our agency uses Acrobat Professional to mark up proofs of documents before we publish then. Recently, we “upgraded” to Pro 7. It is far, far, worse than the previous version, which was at least workable, if somewhat pedestrian.
In 7, when you draw a notes box, it has a sort of exclusionary zone around it, so you can’t draw an arrow anywhere near the box. And they’ve added a new tool, a combo box+arrow tool that is shockingly primitive, looks like it was designed by some high school students as part of a beginning programming class. Plus they gratuitously changed the arrow tool so that the arrowhead is now at the end of the stroke, used to be at the beginning, and worked fine for all that. Do they just have a bit in their source code that flips the sense of the arrow tool around with every release?
Why can’t this company make a usable tool? There isn’t a software company around that I hate more than these guys, and that even includes that outfit up in Redmond. At least their stuff works (sort of). Adobe software is the world’s worst productivity hog.
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[...] I have ranted before on how incredibly slow Adobe Acrobat is for reading PDFs on Windows. Courtesy of Lifehacker, it appears Dean Wiebe has discovered a way to speed up the load time of a PDF in Acrobat. Apparently, the suggested workaround is to move all but a handful of files to a different location within the Plugins directory used by Acrobat. I cannot vouch for this suggested workaround, as I fear the potential breakage on my system of Adobe Acrobat. Thus, your mileage may vary. Nonetheless, I do eat my own dogfood, as I use Foxit Software’s Foxit Reader. It’s nice, fast, and free. [...]
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