Wondered why my computer was feeling a bit slow...

[GNEP]

...so I thought I'd take a look.

Blimmin' Acrobat Reader...

[TransformX]

Did you watch a file being downloaded or locally ?
Acrobat eats tons of cpu when showing files while downloading 'em.

[az]

It's acrobat reader, what did you expect? I wish they could one day adhere to windows interface standards for that app, or pdf gets replaced by something with a proper viewer.

AZ

[Kooldino]

I installed the latest acrobat reader on my system 2 months ago or so. It wouldn't load from IE. What's up with that?

[GNEP]

It's horrid but unfortunately required. The above btw was after I closed all the apps (seemingly...) and switched the monitors off before going to work... came back to find it sluggish and so checked... and Acrobat Reader had been trying to do >something< all day... (I guess I had looked at some PDFs on the web, but always assumed that closing gets rid of reader).

Also hate it when it pops up a dialog box saying "there is a web update for reader" but if by the time the box comes up you have alt-tabbed away from the browser, it looks like the browser has locked up completely. The taskbar and the Alt-Tab window show no sign of this dialog - you will only ever see it to be able to click on it when EVERYTHING else has been minimised... grrr

[Marshmallowman]

There is ghostview/ghostscript for viewing ps and pdf files if acrobat pisses you off to much.

It aint much better but I think it uses less memory

[Kooldino]

Originally posted by Marshmallowman
There is ghostview/ghostscript for viewing ps and pdf files if acrobat pisses you off to much.

It aint much better but I think it uses less memory

How well does it work? Is it free?

[Marshmallowman]

it works well enough , you can find older completely free version, but the current version has a nag window.

Its a little clunky but it can do a fair bit of stuff.

My bro uses it to do print/view science papers etc, wich are only availble in PS or eps files, and fine tuning his stuff(eg PS for printing out formulae's)

For simply reading pdf files it may not be the easiest thing to work with.

But occasionaly acrobat pissses me off enough that I use it for while on occasion,

[rylan]

Yeah acrobat likes to screw my computer up too. Seems after I open about a dozen pdfs throughout the day it crashes or locks up from the insane memory usage.

[Chrono_Wanderer]

Adobe Reader 6 actually loads most (if not all) of my PDFs properly.

But it takes way too long to load

how hard is it to make a reader program to view some stupid PDFs? considering they have a huge team of programmer...

[Technoid]

I'd guess that most of it comes from the fact that the reader is the whole acrobat writer with the "writer" part somewhat shoddily "ripped out"

[GNEP]

And writer is not the nicest piece of software in the world either - for a long while at work they wouldn't let anyone have writer as an install (everything is on a standardised locked-down win2k with network profiles and installation of anything is over the network) as it was COMPLETELY screwing up the registry on these standard win2k systems... IIRC one techy mentioned that the registry was getting too large or something... by 1000% . Adobe's response? Your problem... your systems must be messed up. NOT the way to treat a v. large corporate client who is trying to do things that many other corporates will be doing as well...

[az]

If I was responsible for IT in any company (however small or big), I'd never use pdf. What's its use anyway? So it keeps the layout, can be password protected, and made read-only. And can only be viewed very very inconveniently...

AZ

[Wulfman]

Originally posted by az
If I was responsible for IT in any company (however small or big), I'd never use pdf. What's its use anyway? So it keeps the layout, can be password protected, and made read-only. And can only be viewed very very inconveniently...

AZ

what would you use instead? keeping the layout, not messing around with fonts etc is difficult with other document-types.

mfg
wulfman

[az]

Why is a pixel-perfect layout important for internal communication?

AZ