[PCWorld]

Post your comments for Has Adobe Taken a Wrong Turn with Acrobat 9? here

[Adama]

I have been to two websites this week and they wanted me to download Acrobat 9, in order to view something. So, I left without viewing what I needed.

I'm always a little skeptical of downloading "new" upgrades/updates, I usually like to wait until I've heard if it works well or better than the privious one.

[mcbarker]

I don't/won't have Acrobat Reader on my machine. Instead, I use Foxit Reader. If a PDF file it can't be opened in Foxit, I don't open it... but that's never happened yet.

[Adama]

Why is that, McB? I thought that Adobe Acrobat, MSFT and computers all went hand-in-hand... ?:| please don't shoot me!

[mcbarker]

Hi Adama... IMHO, Acrobat has become much too bloated, and vulnerable to malware attack (online and offline).



I promise not to shoot you if you duck fast... !http://forums.pcworld.com/legacyimages/
1!

[Adama]

DUCKED!!! phew, you missed me by a hair! :^0

[piyushsingh]

mcbarker said:

I don't/won't have Acrobat Reader on my machine. Instead, I use Foxit Reader. If a PDF file it can't be opened in Foxit, I don't open it... but that's never happened yet.

agree with you mcbarker. I also use foxit - extremely light and good for reding pdf files. ;-)

[mathion]

Once again, we have yet another example of the truism 'just because you CAN, doesn't mean you SHOULD'. Acrobat is for DOCUMENTS. A document can be printed in all it's particulars. An Acrobat document used to mean that that it can be read and opened successfully, quickly and easily across virtually every platform.
Not anymore.
Flash can NOT be printed except for a picture (if that). It won't work on many platforms. It's NOT A document. It's, well, tripe most of the time. Unnecessary. Like an outboard motor on a canoe.
I won't be upgrading. I'll be urging my clients not to upgrade either. If someone has a burning desire to embed flash in something to show me, make a webpage. At least with that, I can use FlashBlock in Forefox to tame the flashing beast and still read the document without distractions.

[Evildave]

Everything Adobe's been doing lately is bloat-tastic. I just use 'document viewer' under Ubuntu. There are also a few nice PDF editors for Linux, too. Apparently OpenOffice 3 will even provide some degree of PDF import/edit as well.

I can kind of see where they're 'planning for the future' by integrating Flash into their abominable resource hog.

In a few more years, lightweight document readers (like the Amazon Kindle) and eventually (sooner than you think) paper-thin computers integrated into 'smart paper' will take hold. They want to position themselves to provide 'rich' content besides just dead text and pictures. When you pick up a $10 notepad and every page takes stylus input and animates like something out of a Harry Potter movie, THAT is what Adobe is aiming at with this. Interactive e-paper.

Unfortunately, Adobe is in fact losing control of their own 'standards' because Acrobat (like all of their applications) is such an enormous pig, and their Acrobat authoring tools for Windows are redundant in every OS but Windows, and rapidly becoming redundant even in Windows as people get around to porting their nice, standard code and libraries to import/export PDF to that ugly, broken-down hack-fest called 'Windows'.

What stuffing Flash into it does NOW is raise the bar for what can be considered a PDF compatible reader. Flash its self is a plug-in, so embedding it into Acrobat Reader is no big deal. The bar won't be high for long, though, since embedding Flash into OTHER readers isn't all that complicated, either. Anything like a 'patent' on PDF as a standard has long since gone away. They have to keep extending that standard in order to maintain ownership of it.

Unless they can pare down the ungodly bulk of that beast, Adobe will have a hard time getting their implementation of their own standard(s) adopted into the cheap, lightweight interactive readers of the (near) future.

[lilxkid24]

ey i just use acrobat cuz i have on my flash and im lazy to install foxit

[rberzins]

I think the answer to the question is a resounding yes... The PDF format is maybe the most underrated advance in computers in the last 10 or more years. Remember when every document had to be translated from Wordperfect, to Word to Word for Mac... No such problem with the PDF. And despite the fact that Acrobat Writer is hugely expensive, there really isn't any other software that can work with PDFs as well as it does.

But ... adding flash??? WTF? Why? How is that going to do anything but ruin a virtually perfect format? There's a reason why nobody has come up with anything better. As far as i can tell, flash really doesn't add anything to websites now except for some pretty pictures. And fairly regularly it crashes my computer. It almost makes me wonder if someone at Adobe is trying to ruin the company on purpose by destroying everything that works well. All the Adobe products have gone from being superb to be monstrosities.

Sigh. all good things come to an end i guess.

[puterfixer]

Sir,



You are starting with the false assumption that embedding Flash content in a PDF means embedding Flash video. This breaks down the entire argument you are building from that sentence forward.



Flash is commonly mistaken for a technology used for video or animations. Yes, it can do that, but it is also a very powerful scripting tool for dynamic interfaces with some more programming logic than just reaction to user's input.



Perhaps you were not aware, but the main purpose of a PDF is to use electronic documents. Printing them on paper is so 20th century! To ease the use of electronic documents, PDF can use forms and other sorts of interactive tools - it has its own version of Javascript, reacting on user input. But there are some things which cannot be easily done in this scripting environment, and there's where Flash power comes in. Obviously, from this point of view, it makes sense to leverage the power of Flash in richer user-to-document interactions. You'd fill in a complex PDF form by going through its built-in wizard, for example.



I agree that it would be tremendously stupid to embed Flash Video in a PDF just because the technology allows you to. But my point is that Flash is capable of something much more valuable in the context of electronic documents, and your shallow analysis completely ignored it.





Regards,

puterfixer

[payamjaan]

Adobe took a wrong turn with Acrobat 1.0! It is a phenomenon that such a useless burden is an excuse for document storage and distribution. Goes to show that being first to market is sometimes all you need. sad.

[ivorycruncher]

Hmm, here are some of my thoughts on this.



1 . I agree that Adobe Acrobat had been getting kind of bloated lately, but the 8.0 version of the reader app is actually quite streamlined, and opens up documents MUCH faster than 7.0 did. It is now usable again. There is no reason to not install Adobe Reader, as opposed to a competing third-party viewer. Some of you may have been lucky with generic viewers so far, but I know for a fact there are PDF files out there with more advanced features that require the Adobe Reader itself to view properly. It all depends on what kind of documents you deal with.
2. To Adama: no, you were not prompted to install Acrobat 9, you were prompted to install Flash 9. I have never heard of any problems with installing a new version of the Flash ActiveX control, but I have heard about lots of compatibility problems and security issues it you DON'T upgrade it, so I would highly recommend you do so, and quickly.
3. I would have to say I agree with puterfixer. Flash technology in Acrobat does not instantly mean that PDFs are going to have video in them. As you said, Flash is so much more than just straight video. It's interactive content. I do see the argument where it goes above and beyond your typical document concept, but just because the technology is there doesn't mean you have to use it. Also, one could argue that while PDFs are good for universal viewing and printing, how many of the PDFs you've viewed in your entire lifetime have you actually printed out? I'd have to say that the vast majority of PDF files I look at never get printed. It makes sense that an electronic document should be able to do more than just exist for the sole purpose of being able to be printed easily. I'm guessing things like PDF forms that you can fill out electronically before printing could be greatly enhanced with Flash technology. On the flip side, if this starts to cause lots of compatibility problems with the numerous PDF viewers on the market, especially on platforms where PDFs are supported but Flash is not, that could be bad. If it gets bad enough, it may be the leverage Microsoft needs to make their new XPS format popular (and Silverlight too, for that matter), and right now I'm of the opinion that Adobe is the lesser of two evils for active web content and portable documents. I think Adobe needs to think carefully how they want to proceed with this. If done right, it could be a huge benefit, but if done poorly, it could hurt them badly, especially now that they made PDF an open standard.

[getmything]

Has Adobe got no better ideas to sell its Acrobat products? It's no more a single format, its two formats mixed into one. A technology cocktail indeed!

[nmcallister]

I agree with the people who say "just because it's there doesn't mean you have to use it," to an extent. But this is a standard document format for the Internet we're talking about here. What does it say to me if I'm working on one of the platforms where Flash is not supported (or inadequately supported) and someone sends me a PDF file that contains embedded Flash content? PDF was just about getting to the point where it was more-or-less ubiquitous on a wide variety of devices. I can read PDF files rendered in full-screen graphics on my Nokia 770 Internet tablet, and my BlackBerry can even extract the text from them. For either of these devices, a PDF with embedded Flash would be unusable. So now we've gone from a virtually-ubiquitous PDF to a version of PDF where, if I get a PDF file via e-mail, I may or may not be able to do anything with it, depending on what kind of equipment I plan to view/print it on. How is that a step forward?

[digitaldocumentation]

e-paper doodad - How to read an offline document.pdf (Adobe Acrobat 9) supporting Flash animation and video in a ‘’e-paper`` gadget that is capable of only shows a still image, refreshed each time the page is moved forward and backward ?