I mentioned Adobe the other day, but only to gripe about the installer. There’s so much more to hate!
As just one example, Acrobat Reader 7 doesn’t clean up after itself when you’re done with it; that’s right, it takes up a full 20 megabytes of your hard drive after you’ve uninstalled it. Brilliant! And since they can already bring my 3-Ghz machine to a screaming, grinding standstill just so I can look at a document, gaze with awe upon the current plan to embed Flash in PDF documents, in some horrific nexus of digital suckage. If H.P. Lovecraft wrote software, he’d definitely work for Adobe.
But all is not lost: dear reader, I’m here to help. Listen carefully to what I’m about to say here, and do what I tell you, because I love you and I want you to be happy.
- Get Firefox. I kind of assume you all have it already, but make sure.
- Get PDF-Download 0.6, or whatever the latest version happens to be when you get there. This lets you do some useful stuff, like convert PDFs to HTML on the fly, chose between an external viewer or an internal display, that sort of thing.
- Get FoxIT Reader. Uninstall the Acrobat reader, and install this one.
You will notice the difference immediately, I promise. Faaaaast.
13 Comments
Thanks for pointing out PDF-Download. I need to keep Acrobat on my machine since I occasionally need to create PDFs, but being able to route linked PDFs directly to FoxIt is nice. Much better than “click link, prepare dinner, see if PDF has loaded”.
Yeah, I’ve got Acrobat Pro at work for the same reason; part of Acrobat Pro’s functionality is a Print-To-PDF-file printer driver that lets you print from wherever to a properly set up .pdf. As soon as I find a good freeware replacement for that, I’m going to be able to cut Acrobat out of the loop completely.
Mac users, of course, can take advantage of this moment to shut the hell up, I know you can already do this out of the box.
I really just don’t understand the love of FoxIT that’s been going around lately. It’s ugly! Yes, it’s slightly faster than Adobe Reader, but it’s so much uglier that I can’t bring myself to really give a damn.
This one isn’t too bad, though it does occasionally have some formatting issues. It’s worked pretty well for me, anyway.
Because my time has value.
Because I like the idea of loading a PDF in a tab without having Acrobat stab my web browser in the spine.
Because it’s 2006 and I should be able to look at a fucking document on a computer screen without having the lights in my neighborhood dim and flicker.
These seem like fine reasons to me.
I wish Windows had a PDF reader as nice as evince.
The Acrobat overhead is irritating, sure, but it happens all of once. If you reboot your computer like a normal person (i.e., monthly), you have to put up with slow PDF loading once every four weeks. I can pretty much live with that.
# ps2pdf sec1.ps
This PostScript file was created from an encrypted PDF file.
Redistilling encrypted PDF is not permitted.
%%[ Error: undefined; OffendingCommand: get ]%%
GNU Ghostscript 7.05: Unrecoverable error, exit code 1
feck me sideways with a Ford
I hate that shit. If you can show it to me, then you should be able to print it out, to whatever I want. Full stop. Don’t make me reassemble the document out of tiled screen captures, that’s just gross. But it’s not like it can’t be done.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned CutePDF’s free writer. I think it uses PS2PDF.
http://www.cutepdf.com/Products/CutePDF/writer.asp
I have a couple of PII’s and I don’t install anything newer than Acrobat Reader 5.0. Even on my modern computers I never install above 5. For the same reason, I downgraded Winamp 5 to 2.87. Some products jump the shark at a certain version.
I really, really like PDFcreator – specifically, I like the fact that it pretends it’s a printer, and lets you spit PDF files out with a minimum of hasssle. Thank you, Corey.
I’ll try that CutePDF thing out a little later in the day.
Glad to help.
Hey. Back off Lovecraft. I think maybe you should make a Danielle Steele reference instead.
Bastid. :)