Comments on: OpenSolaris Governing Board, Acrobatics

By: Matěj Cepl

Matěj Cepl — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 16:10:52 +0000

… respecitvely, my point was that Adobe Acrobat Reader should be used only sparringly and when necessary (yes, comments are problem).

Otherwise, in situations when evince is sufficient (which is 100% cases for me, and apparently a little less for you), evince tends to work much better (simple menu, fitting into Gnome better, uncluttered interface, etc.)

By: Matěj Cepl

Matěj Cepl — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 16:08:49 +0000

Sure, I am not arguing against that (we have it in RHEL as well), just wanted to make sure we are on the same page, which apparently we are.

By: calum

calum — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 11:52:02 +0000

@Matěj: I’m not really talking about rendering bugs, just missing features.

E.g. right now I’m collaborating on a PDF document where we’re making heavy use of comments and annotations, but Evince doesn’t let me read existing comments, or add new comments or annotations. So I can’t use Evince for this, I have to use Adobe Reader, or something like Preview on OS X. (Bug numbers: 515243, 568052.)

Last I heard, Reader still had better accessibility support than Evince too, although I haven’t looked into that for a while.

I know there are people working hard on all these things for Evince, but in the meantime, from a business perspective, Adobe Reader is still a necessary evil, IMHO—bottom line is, Sun will sell support for more Solaris desktops because Adobe Reader is available natively. (And you might be surprised how many support contracts Red Hat would lose if there was no Linux version!)

By: Matěj Cepl

Matěj Cepl — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 08:17:35 +0000

> Very fine though Evince is at handling the majority of PDF-reading
> tasks, some jobs still just require the proprietary Real Thing…

and bug numbers at b.g.o are? I am a big fan of elimination of Adobe goo from Linux distros, and I haven’t met for a long time PDF which wouldn’t be processed with Evince correctly (sans Javascript in Reader, which I am really happy that Evince cannot do; apparently Adobe themselves are not eager to fix exploited bug in it).