\jeff{krimmel}

New Acrobat Reader for Linux

I read this article today, and I must admit I was excited. The author tells me that Adobe has released a new version of Acrobat Reader for Linux. That’s great news, for several reasons. Reading PDF documents in Linux has never been a pain, but reading PDFs on Windows can be much easier. While Linux has xpdf, which is a great lightweight PDF reader, there’s no single application that allows me to read PDFs quickly, without the application hanging, while still providing a (somewhat) complete set of user interface (UI) features.

Adobe had a previous version of its Reader for Linux, version 5.0. The one they released recently is version 7.0. They chose not to release 6.0 for Linux, for one reason or another. The improvements in 7.0 are quite noticeable. The UI is much more polished with a better default font. When you click the “X” in the top right hand corner of the application, both the PDF document and the application itself close. In the previous version, only the document would close, so one would have to click on the “X” twice, but not in rapid succession, to get everything to close down. Eric noticed that you can grab pictures from the document, which wasn’t easy (or even possible, maybe) in the previous version. The speed is about the same as before, which is a little bit slower than xpdf on most documents, but there is a small set of PDF documents that xpdf cannot handle, for reasons unknown to me. The mouse wheel allows you to scroll through the document now, as Kristjan noticed.

And the biggest difference is one that I haven’t proven actually exists yet, but one for whose realization I am hoping: the newer version doesn’t crash as much as the previous one. I stopped using Acrobat Reader entirely because of the number of times it caused the whole X server (the graphical display) to hang. I would have to drop back to the terminal and restart X, losing any data I had left unstored on the desktop. I’ve been experimenting with the new version with some documents that gave the previous version trouble, and I haven’t seen any misfires yet. Not a single crash or hang or stall even. Well done.