Birdwatching From United States of America, joined Sep 2003, 3573 posts, RR: 52 Posted (6 years 10 months 1 week 3 days 19 hours ago) and read 1368 times:
Brrrrrrrrrrrrr I hate them so much. I hate Adobe Acrobat in general. Takes ages to load, and then crashes the browser 90% of the time (yes I'm on a brand spanking new computer here)
In addition to that, I'm scared of the monopoly Adobe has with pdf files. They could start charging money overnight, and the web would be screwed.
I understand that there are alternatives to Reader, but AFAIK they're only half legal because the whole pdf thing is patented.
"PDF is great for one thing and one thing only: printing documents. Paper is superior to computer screens in many ways, and users often prefer to print documents that are too long to easily read online.
For online reading, however, PDF is the monster from the Black Lagoon. It puts its clammy hands all over people with a cruel grip that doesn't let go."
Anyway.
Whining time is over.
Soren
[Edited 2006-07-18 19:01:19]
All the things you probably hate about travelling are warm reminders that I'm home
NoUFO From Germany, joined Apr 2001, 7796 posts, RR: 13 Reply 1, posted (6 years 10 months 1 week 3 days 19 hours ago) and read 1355 times:
Firefox uses to ask me if I want to see the PDF in a new window, download it or to forget it and cancel the download which hardly causes Firefox to crash.
PDFs can be great if used properly, and it's an open format, hence there's no reason to be afraid of a monopoly. The fact Adobe swallowed Macromedia is much more scarier.
MBMBOS From United States of America, joined May 2000, 2561 posts, RR: 1 Reply 2, posted (6 years 10 months 1 week 3 days 19 hours ago) and read 1351 times:
You can count me in. File size is humongous and you have to purchase ther very expensive full version of Adobe to manipulate them at all.
Local and federal government has embraced .pdf as a standard. Therefore, if you wish to fill out an online government form and be able to save it, you have to purchase a full Adobe license. What a sweet deal that must be for Adobe.
All I can say is look out for future implementations of XML. I believe it will overtake Adobe for a whole lot of online forms.
Searpqx From Netherlands, joined Jun 2000, 4343 posts, RR: 12 Reply 5, posted (6 years 10 months 1 week 3 days 19 hours ago) and read 1329 times:
I love the "PDF" concept, but I do have two problems with it.
The first is Adobe itself. Full fledged Acrobat is required to create PDFs, and up until version 5 it had everything you needed to make, modify and manipulate both documents and forms. Then in version 6 it must have caught "MSOfficeitis", because it suddenly blew up in size, doubled the system resource needed to run and, most irritatingly, you were required to purchase the "Pro" version to make/manipulate forms, along with some other fairly common functions that were bundled in version 5. Version 7 only made it worse. As a committed capitalist, I fully understand the rationale behind this move, but as a long time user, it burns my butt big time.
The second, and bigger problem, are the users who create multi MB sized PDFs because they don't understand how to do it correctly. Nothing is worse than receiving a 10MB document, only to discover its only two pages that were created as images vs. documents. These are the ones that will crash your browser and slow your computer to a crawl.
Gee, that felt good, I guess I needed a good harmless rant this morning!
"The two most common elements in the universe are Hydrogen and stupidity"
AeroWesty From United States of America, joined Oct 2004, 18864 posts, RR: 64 Reply 6, posted (6 years 10 months 1 week 3 days 18 hours ago) and read 1312 times:
I love PDFs. When I want to save website pages, I print them to PDF. On the Mac it's as easy as pie, just choose "Save as PDF..." from the Print menu. I can view them in the Mac app Preview without any difficulty.
When I use the Dell with WinXP, I use Ghostscript and GSView to create PDFs. It's a bit more complicated, but it works fine, and creates a simple PDF of minimal size.
Anything I fax, I generally make a PDF out of it first. Everything is there, including the cover page, and I can file it all away with ease. PDFs seem to fax extremely well from computers vs. Word or other documents.
Kay From France, joined Mar 2002, 1884 posts, RR: 3 Reply 7, posted (6 years 10 months 1 week 3 days 18 hours ago) and read 1300 times:
1- Version 6 is the slowest piece of software to load I have ever experienced in 14 years of computing.
2- You can't scroll easily in PDF files which makes it the most annoying format to read on PC, they just didn't get it right and still can't.
3- If you want to search for a string, you get a side-column that will display all the results, different from most everything else in the computer industry, and incredibly unusable.
4- Last but not least: the beauty of PDF files? you can't change the content. Oh wait! They just changed that. You can change the content, but the files will only be uglier. You can delete whole pages and even add boxes and overwirte everything. The moment this happened, I stopped seeing any advantage to this format as opposed to MsWord. I am waiting for it to die.
That being said, I love Adobe for their graphic products, name Photoshop and Premiere, which may be the two products that have impressed me the most ever.
NoUFO From Germany, joined Apr 2001, 7796 posts, RR: 13 Reply 8, posted (6 years 10 months 1 week 3 days 18 hours ago) and read 1295 times:
Quoting MBMBOS (Reply 2): Local and federal government has embraced .pdf as a standard. Therefore, if you wish to fill out an online government form and be able to save it, you have to purchase a full Adobe license.
No, there are plenty of solutions, I believe even freeware, but even if you were right, you could still print out the form.
Quoting MBMBOS (Reply 2): All I can say is look out for future implementations of XML. I believe it will overtake Adobe for a whole lot of online forms.
Try to save a filled out online form written in XML. Good luck.
AC773 From Canada, joined Nov 2005, 1730 posts, RR: 3 Reply 9, posted (6 years 10 months 1 week 3 days 18 hours ago) and read 1295 times:
I see that many of you don't agree, but I love PDFs. A couple of years ago, I designed a website for a university's conflict resolution center. We had a ton of documents that had to be made accessible online. The whole process of scanning, importing, and attaching that stuff was made so much easier by the PDF format.
My boss liked it as well, because as the copyright holder he didn't want people copy-and-pasteing or otherwise messing with his documents.
Better to be nouveau than never to have been riche at all.
AeroWesty From United States of America, joined Oct 2004, 18864 posts, RR: 64 Reply 11, posted (6 years 10 months 1 week 3 days 18 hours ago) and read 1283 times:
Quoting Queso (Reply 10): I always knew there was something strange about you but never quite knew what it was until now
RJpieces From , joined Dec 1969, posts, RR: Reply 13, posted (6 years 10 months 1 week 3 days 18 hours ago) and read 1269 times:
I recently discovered that the computer labs in my college allow you to convert word files to PDF so I've been doing that a lot lately with long papers and such.
PDF files can be a pain to open but if you are preparing a special project they look so much fancier!
Searpqx From Netherlands, joined Jun 2000, 4343 posts, RR: 12 Reply 16, posted (6 years 10 months 1 week 3 days 18 hours ago) and read 1258 times:
Quoting Kay (Reply 7): 4- Last but not least: the beauty of PDF files? you can't change the content. Oh wait! They just changed that. You can change the content, but the files will only be uglier. You can delete whole pages and even add boxes and overwirte everything. The moment this happened, I stopped seeing any advantage to this format as opposed to MsWord. I am waiting for it to die.
This is one area I still very much like Acrobat - you can lock the document down so tight the only thing they can do is read it. We used PDF to send out marketing documents in my last job. I had security set so that they were printable and readable, period. Got a call from a competitor one day wanting to copy some of our text, and they couldn't, wanted to know what I'd done!
"The two most common elements in the universe are Hydrogen and stupidity"
NoUFO From Germany, joined Apr 2001, 7796 posts, RR: 13 Reply 18, posted (6 years 10 months 1 week 3 days 18 hours ago) and read 1246 times:
Quoting Kay (Reply 7): If you want to search for a string, you get a side-column that will display all the results, different from most everything else in the computer industry, and incredibly unusable.
Are you crazy? What's wrong with seeing your search results together with the context? And MS Word comes with the same feature depending on your preferences, only that Microsoft's version is less reliable.
I believe the difference between those who hate or like the format is that the latter group actually works with online applications or electronic documents.
Cory6188 From United States of America, joined Feb 2004, 2686 posts, RR: 6 Reply 19, posted (6 years 10 months 1 week 3 days 18 hours ago) and read 1225 times:
As a person who recently got a MacBook Pro, I think that PDF files are super useful. They are totally integrated into Safari, and the Mac lets you save nearly anything as a PDF file and manipulate them as you wish. It's fantastic!
Andz From South Africa, joined Feb 2004, 8298 posts, RR: 11 Reply 22, posted (6 years 10 months 1 week 3 days 17 hours ago) and read 1205 times:
I guess I am a very simple pdf user. I have never had a browser crash and never had the need to manipulate one. I use WIN2PDF to create pdfs from any Windows program and that works perfectly too.
So put me in the pro-pdf column.
After Monday and Tuesday even the calendar says WTF...
MBMBOS From United States of America, joined May 2000, 2561 posts, RR: 1 Reply 24, posted (6 years 10 months 1 week 3 days 17 hours ago) and read 1182 times:
Quoting NoUFO (Reply 8): Try to save a filled out online form written in XML. Good luck.
Presently, yes. But a lot of forms-centric sites are going XML for their electronic filings, including the U.S. Patent Office.
25 Soyuzavia: Not bad, but some PDF can lose formatting. The easiest thing to do is install this Firefox extension https://addons.mozilla.org/addon.php?id=636 http
26 Kay: Which keystroke? What I'd like to do is jump from one to the next without using the mouse, but rather a keystroke. I am too lazy (and tired) to resea
27 Vaporlock: Ah...LOL, honestly pdf files are no different than any others...if you have Illustrator just open them there and you should never crash your computer
28 Klaus: It's simply the truth, so thank you! I'm not aware of any exceptions so far - PDF printing is simply one of the output options in the system-wide pri
29 RichardPrice: Wrong, PDF is an open format and implementations are completely legal. Hell I have implemented a subset of it myself. There are many free or cheap re
30 IFEMaster: No it's not. Google CutePDF - free utility that will turn any document or image in to a PDF file. I love PDF.
31 Searpqx: Ok, I wasn't clear - within the Adobe world, to fully work with PDFs (create, edit, secure, etc.) you need full fledged Acrobat. My rant was more abo
32 Ps76: Hi I use Acrobat Reader 4 from www.Oldversion.com which is faster than the bigger, newer versions (especially on my Pentium II!) but is working ok for
33 ShyFlyer: While I wouldn't go so far as to say I love PDFs, though I don't despise them either. I use them everyday at work, both creating them and using those
34 BristolFlyer: Hate them. This is the worst one: BF
35 AeroWesty: I've been doing this myself at home with all my old papers that need saving, using a scanner with a sheet-feeder. It works like a charm, and I don't
36 ShyFlyer: I'll be doing this as well as soon as the ol' wallet will allow.
37 Nudelhirsch: Here are good things about it: -Document can be locked, so that nobody can mess with it... -smaller than .doc if you have pics and screenshots, which
38 Diamond: PDF's are great for sending out an important document that you do not want to have changed or edited by recipients. There are numerous other ways to s
39 BNE: I also could not live with the usefulness of pdfs. At work we have converted all our operating manuals into pdfs and then having them put on a CD.
40 Killjoy: I dislike pdf not because it's a bad format, but because people misuse it. It's nice for distributing things that have been laid out meticulously, but
41 RichardPrice: HTML rendering changes (sometimes wildly) with browser version, PDF rendering shouldnt change with reader version.
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