Adobe Acrobat goes online, Reader gets a boost

[Alexander Turcic]

Today Adobe unveiled the beta of their Acrobat.com online services. From the Acrobat.com blog:

Acrobat.com is a suite of online services hosted by Adobe that you can use to create documents together and share them with others. It helps people get document work done faster, without email attachments or version confusion, and it makes your documents look great so that you and your work look great, too.

We are starting with three distinctive applications:

• Adobe Buzzword for creating and reviewing documents together.
• Adobe ConnectNow for holding full-fledged online web conferences with up to three people.
• The Acrobat.com organizer for sharing 5GB of files with others online, including the ability to convert 5 documents to PDF and embed your documents in blogs, wikis or other web pages

CNet has some more details and screenshots.

In a related news, the upcoming Acrobat Reader 9 (to be released in July) has been rewritten to improve start-up performance by only starting plug-ins on-demand; as a result, so we are promised, it should load two to three times faster than previous Adobe Reader incarnations (and probably also use less memory).

[Tom90deg]

I don't know about anyone else, but I kicked Adobe Acrobat to the curb the instant I found out about Foxit reader. Does anyone else use Acrobat to use PDFs, or has the long history of long load times and huge memory uses turned you off to it? (Why, yes, I am bitter. How could you tell?)

[rhadin]

I use Acrobat for all my PDF work and have done so for years. I have investigated using other PDF creators but there was always some hitch. For me, I need the capabilities that Acrobat provides -- and the standardization -- for business purposes. I don't find either the load times or the memory usage troublesome (I'm running Acrobat Professional 8). Perhaps it is because of the computer I'm using (e.g., I have 4GB of RAM).

[bwaldron]

Originally Posted by Tom90deg

I don't know about anyone else, but I kicked Adobe Acrobat to the curb the instant I found out about Foxit reader. Does anyone else use Acrobat to use PDFs, or has the long history of long load times and huge memory uses turned you off to it? (Why, yes, I am bitter. How could you tell?)

I am still using Acrobat Pro, but have not and don't plan to upgrade from version 7. Besides the issues mentioned, Adobe's product activation (and lack or responsiveness to problems I had with it) have turned me off.

If and when I do need to update, I will be looking at third-party applications for PDF creation and editing.

[gnawingonfoot]

After discovering Foxit, I made a point of forcing all my friends to replace Adobe with it. Well, it wasn't really forcing, as they were all as eager as I was to get rid of that bloated piece of... well, I guess it might have some use for someone. This news of an update doesn't really change anything, though. I doubt it'll even be approaching the friendliness of Foxit.

[astra]

Originally Posted by Tom90deg

I don't know about anyone else, but I kicked Adobe Acrobat to the curb the instant I found out about Foxit reader

I have used Foxit as well until one day a colleague told me that a pdf file she is trying to read doesn't look as sharp as she would like and she asked me whether the problem might lie with Foxit that I suggested to install. So, we installed Adobe Reader 8....and the pdf file looked a lot better, sharp and crisp as it should. Since then I gave up on Foxit.

[WillAdams]

Acrobat 6 was the version w/ the big / slow-loading problem. 7 wasn't too bad at all and v8 loads quite quickly on my 800MHz P3. If one wishes plug-ins can be removed to further speed up pretty much any version.

That said, another interesting alternative is Sumatra PDF:

http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/...pdf/index.html

which I see has finally gotten auto-reloading of changed .pdfs and pdfsync integration.

William

[HPG]

The problem I find with the Adobe stable of pdf readers/creators (and with other Adobe products) isn't so much the slow launch -- they seem to have fixed that in the latest versions -- as their extraordinary intrusiveness in the way they install themselves. The upshot is that sometimes it can be nightmare to install the software, and sometimes bits of it never work properly, returning weird error messages. If you track these problems down in the Adobe knowledge base (or whatever it's called) they turn out to be to do with the way permissions are set (or aren't) in the Windows registry, and the "solution" is often to change what can turn out to be dozens of key permissions (as if any normal user wants to go anywhere near the registry). And they insert all manner of menu items in other applications without asking permission. Oh, and the prices, too. Foxit is such a refreshing change from this bloatware.

[Alexander Turcic]

Originally Posted by WillAdams

That said, another interesting alternative is Sumatra PDF:

http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/...pdf/index.html

Thanks for the pointer. I recently tried Sumatra PDF; while it certainly works fine, I found it still inferior to Foxit Reader in terms of memory usage and rendering speed. Foxit seems great, though I am worried that they'll eventually turn it into bloatware as well (while previous versions allowed you to download javascript support as an addon, they decided to always include it in the current version).

[pieter]

Foxit user here as well. I had enough of the aggressive bloated install of Adobe.