Another Hardware Vendor Joins The Linux Foundation

[Hephasteus]

You shouldn't have told me that. Now I'll have to resist the temptation to brick my TV.

Life Sucks. Hack it?

[yotambien]

We really should be grateful for that (it's very useful for study since my professors use lots of PDF files and also certain PDF ebooks only can be displayed correctly with the Acrobat Reader)

Uh, what planet are you from?

Flash is a piece of s**t that gouges up 60% of a 2.8Ghz Phenom II and Acrobat reader takes ages to load and trashes and is unresponsive, compared to Evince, or any other PDF reader made by some guys at home for free, not by a gigantic billionaire corporation.

Except for a VERY niche market of DTP and related, what does PDF offer over DJVU, for example ? The fact that they modify their proprietary format once in a while just a teeny bit so PDF authored with an updated version of Acrobat Professional don't display correctly in anything else except their pi$$-poor, cpu hogging, ram gouging reader?

I guess you missed the central sentence of the post you were replying to, the one I copied above. That Evince and company are made by some guys at home for free shows badly. The idea that the quality of an application is to be measured by the package size, RAM usage or initial load time is ridiculous. If that's what matters to you perhaps you should consider using pdftotext and pdfimages in combination with cat and display to open pdf files. PDF is now an international standard, so your claims about Adobe changing "their proprietary format" for their own benefit are wrong. Not to talk about comparing pdf and djvu formats (similar to compare speex and Vorbis or FLAC): they don't solve the same problems.

In their high priority free software projects, the Free Software Foundation lists GNU PDF in the first position, with the objective of "[...] develop and provide a free, high-quality, complete, and portable set of libraries and programs to manage the PDF file format (ISO 32000), and associated technologies". Their description of the PDF format goes on like this: "The PDF format is an international standard (ISO 32000) and current free software support for PDF contains few of the supported features. We believe that we urgently need a collection of free software PDF libraries and programs that can fully implement this standard and provide users with many of the features they are currently missing in their PDF applications, such as support for interactive forms and JavaScript validation, annotation support, and embedded movies and 3D artwork?just to name a few". Go tell them Evince is good enough. Or djvu.

So yes, we should be extremely grateful that Adobe provides a high quality PDF viewer for Linux and Solaris in several formats for users' convenience. But even if you happen to dislike their product and don't use it, the discourse of hating a company for actually releasing their applications is ridiculous. I may not like OpenOffice or hate Quake III, but every Linux user should value positively that Sun and Id released their products for this platform. I don't know what would happen if we didn't have Flash from Adobe, perhaps Gnash would be more evolved or whatever. What I know is that I have access to a format that's ubiquitous on the internet; and no, I don't want to be out of that regardless of what the prevalent geek opinion is apropos of the technical merits of the format.

[CNCFarraday]

I won't even bother answering yotambien. His careful worded crap ("geek opinion", sounds like an with a MacBook Air and an MBA), his total willful ignorance on the subject of the quality of the Flash Player for Linux, his absurd claim that the resources used up by an application to do its task are irrelevant ( you drive alone in a giant SUV, by any chance, because resources consumed to do a task are irrelevant ? )

The fact is that Adobe Corporation is enriching itself by externalizing the cost of a proper Flash plugin to users who are forced to buy far more powerful and expensive hardware which consumes more electricity.

Put your post in your resume and try apply for platform evangelist at Adobe.

[RobbieAB]

Except for a VERY niche market of DTP and related, what does PDF offer over DJVU, for example ?

PDF-A.

(Drat, don't quotes count towards the post length?!)

[yotambien]

I won't even bother answering yotambien. His careful worded crap ("geek opinion", sounds like an with a MacBook Air and an MBA), his total willful ignorance on the subject of the quality of the Flash Player for Linux, his absurd claim that the resources used up by an application to do its task are irrelevant ( you drive alone in a giant SUV, by any chance, because resources consumed to do a task are irrelevant ? )

The fact is that Adobe Corporation is enriching itself by externalizing the cost of a proper Flash plugin to users who are forced to buy far more powerful and expensive hardware which consumes more electricity.

Put your post in your resume and try apply for platform evangelist at Adobe.

You are always on time to rectify and show that you are a mature fellow. Nobody is going to think you are an idiot or an ignorant for doing so. I'm not so sure about it if you limit yourself to twisting my words and insulting me instead of tackling my arguments. My previous post remains unchallenged in its entirety.

[kernelOfTruth]

@CNCFarraday:

you know what ? to back up the statement I gave I give you another example:

show me only "ONE" example from the open-source world of an PDF viewer that is able to print a selected range of pages, e.g.

10,11,13,28,29,30,42,43 (out of 44)

each qt4-(or qt3)-based reader isn't able to do so because of the restrictedness of the underlying toolkit

the only one that was able to do so for me was Adobe's Acrobat Reader

if you want only open(source)-ish software on your box I'm fine but don't scare/annoy away companies you're dependent on (since they're simply no valid alternatives) if you want to work productive with Linux Distributions !

@Adobe:

THANK YOU !

[monraaf]

@CNCFarraday:

you know what ? to back up the statement I gave I give you another example:

show me only "ONE" example from the open-source world of an PDF viewer that is able to print a selected range of pages, e.g.

10,11,13,28,29,30,42,43 (out of 44)

Huh, Evince will do that just fine. Nor have I in years encountered a situation where Evince had a problem opening or rendering a PDF file. So for me I have no need for Adobe's pdf viewer.

[kernelOfTruth]

Huh, Evince will do that just fine. Nor have I in years encountered a situation where Evince had a problem opening or rendering a PDF file. So for me I have no need for Adobe's pdf viewer.

ah - going the gnome route

thanks monraaf !

unfortunately there are still some rendering (rather printing than rendering) problems with evince from time to time for me

so that font (text) disappears in the print-out

[smitty3268]

On the qt side, a guy is working on patching qt to get advanced printing into it. I can't remember if he's finished page ranges or not, but I think so. Has to wait until the next version of qt before it can go in, though.

[CNCFarraday]

ah - going the gnome route

Ignorance is bliss.

As I've said, except for the DTP niche who can stay where it is now (Apple) open source alternatives to Adobe's binary, bloated crap are better for PDF.

Now, anyone up to thank Adobe for Flash Player? Anyone with a Mobile Core i7 Extreme feeling like playing Desktop Tower Defense in Flash on Linux x64?