I've seen some other folks crank about this, but I'll add my voice to the din:Acrobat Reader 6.0 sucks.
The damn thing is horribly slow to launch, which is the biggest complaint I've seen around, and one I find really annoying. 5.x was slow, but nowhere near this slow. It rivals Pagemaker's launch speeds, and Pagemaker's a classic app and an amazing resource pig. (Unfair, I know--it does a lot and has a plugin facility that requires launch-time bindings)
Worse than that the search function for it is, in the normal case, utter crap. Yeah, sure, it's got recursive directory search capabilities, which are nifty, but I've used them exactly once so far. Firing up a search in 6.0 takes ages, resizes the damn document (which is probably why it takes so long), and eats up huge amounts of screen real-estate for not a whole lot. The 5.x style "pop up a little box with a few checkbox options" was much nicer. Yes, the full and fancy search is good as an option, but it really shouldn't be the default.
Oh, yeah, and the splash box is dopey too. Not only is it big, but it's got an overlay swoosh that extends outside it. (Well, at least on OS X it does) Thanks, it's clever, I'm impressed, please stop that. I'd turn it off, but given how long this thing takes to launch, well...
And this version has JavaScript support. Oh, joy, oh rapture, oh boy a potential security hole. I could've sworn that PDF files were a restricted subset of Postscript specifically designed to render documents pretty darned safely. (Postscript, while cool, is a full-on Forth-style language, and it's pretty easy to write a postscript doc that can do a DOS attack, or close to it. Go google for postscript-based raytracing (No, I do not joke) if you're interested) JavaScript, while sucking far less in its pure form than most people think, isn't. I just hope Adobe's got a very restricted set of functions exposed to it.
I think I'll stick with Acrobat 5.1 for now.
Posted by Dan at June 16, 2003 01:48 PM | TrackBack (0)I haven't used Acrobat 6.0 yet, but I can tell you that JavaScript support in PDF's has been there since at least version 3 or 4 (I forget which). It's support is mostly split between form processing and document navigation/resizing. It was more buggy than a Netscape 3 browser, but you could get some stuff done with it.
Posted by: Robert Hahn at June 16, 2003 02:22 PMOh, joy. I do so hope they've got JavaScript locked down, then. (Whatever happened to documents just being, well, documents? When did everything have to sing and dance too?)
Posted by: Dan at June 16, 2003 03:17 PMI'm curious - why bother using Acrobat at all? My Windows survival kit includes Ghostscript and GSView, and I haven't run across a PDF they can't handle yet.
Maybe that's because I usually only read technically undemanding content, and because I think that rendering PDF and PS files within a browser window makes baby Cthulhu cry (the Acrobat plugin has a marvellous habit of crashing or hanging, so much so that I associate the erroneous behaviour with it more so than its intended purpose), but so far it has worked for me.
What are you doing with PDF files that require the Acrobat Reader?
Posted by: Gnomon at June 18, 2003 02:11 PMI've got an OS X machine, so using Ghostscript's a pain, as well as generally unneccesary--Acrobat for Macs has always sucked far, far less than it does on Windows boxes. I've really had no problem with it up until 6 came out. Acrobat 5 was actually very nice as these things went, since it handled searching for text inside PDF files quite nicely.
I've downgraded to 5 for most things, and if it gets really bad I can toss acrobat altogether and go with Preview on OS X (which handles PDFs pretty well) though I'd rather not.
Posted by: Dan at June 27, 2003 09:50 AM