[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by Lemurion

My own experience with Adobe formats (particularly PDF) is that they seem biased toward the creator's desires at the expense of the user's needs.

Coming from a company of SW creators--especially a company that has been victim of rampant product piracy in the past--I'd think that's understandable.

Originally Posted by Lemurion

I also have had issues with using Adobe software in the past. Earlier versions of Acrobat reader were incredibly slow-- even with relatively fast computers-- and I find the updater to be annoying as well.

It's this combination of documents that I have to struggle to read because they won't reflow to fit my screen, and software that gets in the way that makes me distrust Adobe products.

My own experience has caused me to react negatively to Adobe products because I associate them with slow software and being forced to jump through unnecessary hoops.

I wouldn't consider product quality a reason for "distrust"... just dislike. And as later versions of Acrobat are faster than older versions, and as reflow works on my PC and my PDA, for instance, using actual Adobe SW (and not someone else's emulator), I'm not sure product quality is as much of an issue as you suggest. If you use an emulator, you might direct your distrust at the emulator makers.

Originally Posted by Lemurion

(Try reading several hundred pages of double column PDF documents for work where you have to do the scroll down and jog up thing because no matter what combination of resolution and zoom you pick it's impossible to get the whole page on the screen and still have it be legible.)

Sure, scrolling up and down multi-column text sucks on any format. (Maybe you need a larger screen?...) But again, this isn't a fault of PDFs, it's a fault of bad formatting for screen-based use, the fault of the PDF creator, and not a reason to "distrust Adobe."

The point is, Adobe SW does what it's supposed to do, and Adobe is a business doing just what businesses generally do. If you have specific needs (like reading columns of text), you should make sure you have the proper equipment to do that, and not blame Adobe because your task isn't suited to the equipment or methods you'd prefer to use. Dislike them for being draconian, or expensive, fine. But blaming them beyond that is like my blaming Hyundai because my car can't fly.