Filed under: Software
Adobe has released version 9 of its Adobe Reader PDF display software. The newest version includes a number of changes including faster launching, "PDF Portfolios" (bundles of PDFs and other document types), native Flash support, and support for the online Acrobat.com beta (through Adobe AIR) with a variety of online PDF services.To find out what version of Mac OS you are running, go to the Apple logo in the top left corner, click it and choose About This Mac. From that window you will see the version number, processor, memory and chosen startup disk. Clicking Software Update will check for updates, and More Info... will open up an extensive list of everything on your machine.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Bassir said 5:09PM on 7-02-2008
After switching to Mac OS X a few weeks ago, one of the things I really love about it is that I don't need Reader anymore. No more taking hours to load a PDF thanks to that stupid "reader"--now I can rest assured that that nasty piece of software won't haunt me anymore because I use Preview.
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kleinias said 5:20PM on 7-02-2008
As a relatively new mac user, I have to admit that I feel much the same way as you do. Sometimes it's the simple things that make you appreciate osx.
waiownsyou said 5:20PM on 7-02-2008
Not to be a jerk-off or anything, but isn't this being reported to the wrong crowd? After all, I've only needed Preview to run .PDF files on my MacBook Pro...
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Chris said 5:24PM on 7-02-2008
No thanks. I'll stick with Preview and PDF Browser Plugin for Firefox 3 on my BlackBook.
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Jack Brewster said 5:25PM on 7-02-2008
Gus Muelier (Acorn, VoodooPad) had an interesing Out-of-the-box experience with Acrobat 9:
http://gusmueller.com/blog/archives/2008/07/adobe_reader_9_is_out!.html
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Xanthor said 5:34PM on 7-02-2008
I'm with the gnarling masses: I create atleast ten PDFs a day and I've never imagined using the horrid Adobe Acrobat Pro.
I mean, I own the thing, and it still isn't worth booting up!
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reallycrazyguy said 5:40PM on 7-02-2008
Acrobat Reader 9 is crazy big. 190 Mb big. Just to read PDF files. And they force users to install Acrobat AIR, just to artificially boost the install base, as Reader doesn't seem to use AIR itself. Even the Acrobat AIR uninstaller is bloated at over 43 Mb [that JUST uninstalls AIR].
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Bob Smith said 5:41PM on 7-02-2008
Preview doesn't save editable PDFs with forms (like IRS 1040s). The saved PDF isn't editable. Adobe Reader does this correctly.
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imatt said 5:51PM on 7-02-2008
I too will stick to Preview. I'm glad it's free, b/c nobody that owns a Mac would pay for it. Preview has always worked for me. PDFs are searchable, and with Quicklook in Leopard, I don't even need to open the PDF most of the time. Thanks anyway, Adobe. Move along.
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imatt said 5:52PM on 7-02-2008
Just to clarify, I meant that adobe is free and nobody would pay for it. Of course I know Preview is also free, and bundled with OS X.
Vince said 6:42PM on 7-02-2008
I was around 25% done with the download when I remembered that I don't even have Adobe Reader on my computer. I've had my Mac for 6 months, but I am still so used to Adobe Reader. Thank God I don't use that piece of bloatware anymore.
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Blax said 7:21PM on 7-02-2008
I haven't had to use Reader in forever, and I'm very glad. Before I switched to OS X about this time last year (and before a brief flint with Ubuntu before that), I used Foxit Reader on Windows XP.
Since then, I've recommended it to my friends still on Windows, and safe to say, noone has had any problems or complaints like they did with Reader.
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gtoast said 8:13PM on 7-02-2008
So here's something interesting that Reader does that Preview doesn't. According to this document on adobe's website (http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=333447&sliceId=2) Adobe 8.x had support for 2D GPU acceleration on supported graphics cards.
My graphics card at work isn't supported, but it would be nice to have it on some of the huge PDFs I get from clients.
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jimeh said 5:33PM on 7-04-2008
Actually, Preview already supports GPU acceleration. In fact, most apps on Mac OS X does, and has done ever since October 2003 with the release of 10.3 Panther, which featured QuartzExtreme, a hardware accelerated version Mac OS X's previously Quartz rendering engine.
Preview (and QuickLook on Leopard) makes extremely good use of QuartzExtreme, as its based on the PDF format, and its hardware accelerated. That was the reason Apple was advertising Preview as the fastest PDF viewer on the planet back in 2003, cause it was, it was the first PDF viewer to have hardware acceleration, and it was the first major OS to have it too.
As for what Adobe are doing with Reader, well, it doesn't seem to help them much, even the OSX version (which you figure should benefit from running under QuartzExtreme) is quite a bit slower on OSX, with or without the GPU acceleration options turned on.
In fact, I just compared Preview and Acrobat Pro 8 to each other with Apple's latest Apple Human Interface Guidelines PDF, which is a nice 28MB of 402 pages filled with text, screenshots, graphics, and whatnot. While Preview was impressively snappy even when scrolling from first to last page in 1-2 seconds with pages display continuously (as in the scroll area is a long which has the pages after each other, rather than you can only see one page at a time). Acrobat Pro 8 on the other hand, was quite so laggy, sometimes only managing to update the PDF view about 10 times between start a finish, while Preview had it going at what looked like a smooth 25fps movie :)
Anyway, bottom line is, that Adobe's Reader, or Acrobat are only useful to you, when you really must have one of those latest fancy (and stupid a lot of the time) features. But I'd guess, 99.9% of people, would hardly ever need it. In fact, I'm not sure why I had Acrobat Pro installed here in the first place. I guess I felt uncomfortable with unchecking it when I installed CS3 :P
yoinkers said 9:17PM on 7-02-2008
Thanks but no thanks Adobe. You're worse than microsoft when it comes to bloatware.
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Benjamin said 4:38AM on 7-03-2008
I've seen several PDFs that Preview won't display properly, and it doesn't support editable forms.
While I do use Preview for most PDFs, it's handy to have Adobe Reader around as well.
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