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Adobe Reader 9 released

by Mat Lu Jul 2nd 2008 at 5:00PM

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.

Adobe Reader 9 is a free download from Adobe and is platform (Intel/PPC) specific.

[via Macworld]

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Adobe has released version 9 of its Adobe Reader PDF display software. The newest version includes a number of changes including faster...
 

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Benjamin

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.

July 03 2008 at 4:38 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
yoinkers

Thanks but no thanks Adobe. You're worse than microsoft when it comes to bloatware.

July 02 2008 at 9:16 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
gtoast

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.

July 02 2008 at 8:12 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to gtoast's comment
jimeh

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

July 04 2008 at 5:32 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
blax

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.

July 02 2008 at 7:21 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Vince

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.

July 02 2008 at 6:42 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
imatt

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.

July 02 2008 at 5:51 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to imatt's comment
imatt

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.

July 02 2008 at 5:52 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
reallycrazyguy

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].

July 02 2008 at 5:40 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Josh Farkas

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!

July 02 2008 at 5:34 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Bob Smith

Preview doesn't save editable PDFs with forms (like IRS 1040s). The saved PDF isn't editable. Adobe Reader does this correctly.

July 02 2008 at 5:29 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Jack Brewster

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

July 02 2008 at 5:24 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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