Acrobat Reader for Linux removed | Hacker News Reader

Acrobat Reader for Linux removed

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78 pointsdecafbad91 comments

The solutions here seem to be split into two camps:

1. Use Okular / Evince / Poppler / Sumatra / Zathura / whatever (actually, I think you might begin to see the problem already).

2. Use Acrobat Reader in Wine.

Neither of these is going to appeal to my family members whose idea of a good time is not installing something via "Software Center" and spending ages tweaking the configuration to work properly, so they can use a half-speed version of Acrobat Reader on Windows. They will probably end up sticking with Mac or Windows.

Which is perfectly fine, because no one is forcing them to use Linux. I just want to point out that stuff like this totally kills the idea of "Linux for the everyday user". First you have to offer them a lot of the stuff which they are accustomed to (a decent document editor, a decent PDF reader), then slowly increase their awareness about software freedoms. It is unfortunate that most FSF zealots end up reversing this order, and driving away the common user.

Solutions? I'm not sure, maybe someone can weigh in. The best I can think of right now is for organizations like Canonical and Red Hat who might be interested in promoting Desktop Linux to pay for Adobe to release and support Acrobat on their distros. Either that, or actively put in some sort of a translation chart in the OS for common users "Acrobat <-> Evince" or such.

I upvote this. Especially the Wine option. IMHO it should be advertised that "You can run Windows programs on Linux by using Wine".

Are there any Linux PDF readers that work as well? For instance I reported this bug https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=628920 years ago but the example PDF I included still looks horrible in the latest Evince. So I typically keep a copy of Adobe Reader installed to deal with files like that, but I'd love to replace it with something open source.

I generally find most PDFs come from the web.. so PDF.js has been more than sufficient for my needs.

xpdf renders it nicely, it is anti-userfriendly and ancient though. ;) http://i.imgur.com/9FHRqio.png

The text looks different because "Syntax Warning: Substituting font 'Times-Roman' for 'NewCenturySchlbk-Roman'".

Crazy how that poppler bug is almost 10 years old and not fixed even though it seems like such an integral part of a PDF library.

I know you already realize it, but others might not, but xpdf is still "bugged" in this case. In the bug report, the missing font is substituted with a default sans-serif font (presumably DejaVu Sans or Ubuntu on Ubuntu), while in your image it is replaced by Times Roman. The spacing of the text is completely wrong in both cases, but it's just worse in the sans-serif case.

I didn't realise that, thanks! Sounds like it might be a good idea to collect such cases and build substitution rules for font-config.

The problem with that document (for me) is that it does not embed its fonts, and I do not have the fonts it uses (or any compatible ones) on my computer either. So, when I view it, the font gets substituted by the default sans-serif font, which has completely different (and wrong) metrics. Presumably, Adobe Reader comes with more (compatible) fonts and is able to make better substitution.

In the past, when I have other documents which also don't embed their fonts, but for which I have a compatible substitution font on my computer (that Evince doesn't pick up for whatever reason), I just run it through gs and it embeds the substitution font into the result.

I'm not sure this is really a bug in Evince/poppler in this case as much as a malformed document that presumes the viewer has Century Schoolbook font on their computer.

I've been using zathura and it works quite well.

It looks like it's a font [naming/substitution] problem.

This http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1363557 fixed the display of that file for me [Kubuntu 14.04]. I installed a close font "New CenturySchlbk-Normal" and then inserted:

     <match target="pattern">
       <test qual="any" name="family"><string>NewCenturySchlbk</string></test>
       <edit name="family" mode="assign" binding="same"><string>NewCenturySchlbk-Normal</string></edit>
     </match>

in to my /home/username/.config/font-manager/local.conf file.

I didn't need to do anything further. Testing before with fc-match gave:

user@localhost$ fc-match "New CenturySchlbk" DejaVuSans.ttf: "DejaVu Sans" "Book"

Testing after gave:

user@localhost$ fc-match "NewCenturySchlbk" NewCenturySchlbk_Normal.ttf: "NewCenturySchlbk-Normal" "Regular"

Everything I tested on Okular, xpdf, The GIMP, LibreOffice, .., all gave the same results (ie this fix worked on them) except for LibreOffice which failed a lot less after the fix. Perhaps the way the creating program embedded the font was incorrect and so none of the readers good use the embedded font to render the text correctly?

pdf.js did well before, better than Okular or xpdf, but better after the fix too.

Your primary choices in renderers are the following:

    - XPDF - the OG *nix PDF renderer.

    - Poppler (fork of xpdf). Probably most featureful,
      different features supported among different 
      implementations (e.g. Evince and Okular appear to 
      behave differently and have different feature sets).

    - Mupdf, newer code base, made by Ghostscript team. Only 
      supports rendering PDFs and XPS. No fancy javascript 
      or form support.

    - PDF.js via Mozilla browsers.

    - PDFium via Chrome-based browsers.

MuPDF claims to support forms and JavaScript as of version 1.2.

PDF.js is not limited to Firefox. Here's a Chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pdf-viewer/oemmndc...

This is how it looks in Evince @ CentOS7 http://i.imgur.com/SIq9v4r.png (including font substitution issue)

I am a fan of [Zathura](http://pwmt.org/projects/zathura/) from pwmt.org. Far faster at rendering large pdfs than Reader of Evince. Vim-like shortcuts as a bonus.

Good riddance, I guess? I believe there isn't any shortage of good PDF viewers for GNU/Linux.

Yeah, not exactly sad about this one. PDF being an open spec, the closed source acrobat reader is completely irrelevant to the Linux world (if not entirely harmful to newcomers to linux who go and find the only PDF reader they ever knew about).

I still use it to fill out PDF files with forms. What other linux PDF viewer can do that? I heard that KDE/Okular can do it, is there any KDE independent software that can do it?

I use Gimp to to edit PDF files. Works amazingly well.

I use both Okular and Google Chrome for filling PDF forms.

Define "KDE-independent" - Okular works fine on other Linux desktops (it's also set up as the default PDF reader on my Windows 8 install, actually).

Evince does it.

None that handle digital signatures and online filing, sadly.

For example UK HMRC tax returns must be done using Adobe Reader.

Some Adobe Air apps, like the one to fill the tax forms in Poland, require Adobe Reader for form support.

Isn't this type of attitude what holds Linux back from being a viable desktop OS? Average consumers would want popular apps that they know. How is that harmful?

Just because Linux is open source, doesn't mean every app on it has to be. It needs popular apps to ever be a real desktop OS. No different than why Windows phone OS struggles today.

> Just because Linux is open source, doesn't mean every app on it has to be

No, but every app being open source (or rather Free Software, which is usually the case) can be supported easily by communities of users who can then bring it to tons of different architectures. That's why you get Evince on ARM, for example, and not the official Adobe Acrobat Reader.

But on the other hand, every app is just as free to be disregarded by a community of developers even if there is still lots of end users who need it. Or for the software to never reach the level required by intense professional use. Or a understaffed and underfunded community that provides a critical but unsexy part of the infrastructure coughheartbleedcough.

>But on the other hand, every app is just as free to be disregarded by a community of developers even if there is still lots of end users who need it.

The problem is not unique to open-source software.

this is true, but if you are going enterprise-grade you at least will sign an x-years support contract. If there are lots of end users for desktop software then it should in theory be profitable for a company to keep making it, rather than being dependent on volunteers to stay interested.

>If there are lots of end users for desktop software then it should in theory be profitable for a company to keep making it,

I've been bitten this way too. It was a hardware/software product, small company made a neat little USB DAQ that became very popular. Bigger entrenched player bought the company and discontinued the line. Shortly after that they released their own product based on the ones they discontinued, but now it requires a much more expensive software package. Just because a commercial product is profitable does not guarantee its longevity.

every app being open source (or rather Free Software, which is usually the case)

Virtually every open source application is also Free Software, and vice-versa. The most common licenses (GPL, BSD, MIT, Apache, etc) fit both definitions.

I have seen "Open Source" licenses which do not permit modification nor re-distribution. It's certainly not equivalent to the principle of Free Software.

Ah, yes, there are "open source" licenses that don't follow the Open Source Initiative's definition. Still, Linux distributions tend to abide by it, as far as I know.

How GNU/Linux is relevant here? Average consumers know Windows and would want it (seriously, they frequently consider GNU/Linux to be another version of Windows and expect it to behave almost exactly like Windows did, then get disappointed it doesn't - that happened to my dad, for example)

GNU's not Windows, nor strives to be one. It's about bringing Free Software to whoever wants/needs it, not winning in popularity contest.

I don't care about Adobe Acrobat being closed source (though an open source one would be better). I care about it being a terrible app.

There's a lot of linux-compatible closed source apps I enjoy. Teamspeak, games, etc. Adobe Acrobat is one of the ones we absolutely don't need - there are many better alternative.

What PDF readers on linux are 'best recommended'? I compared acroread with evince and kpdf in the past and found that acroread was the most parsimonious in use of resources (especially RAM on large documents). Have not repeated the comparison recently, so will be glad to hear about recommendations with more recent experiences with large documents with images.

Firefox's builtin pdf.js reader has really matured and I switched to using it as my primary reader. It's even good enough for me to read books since it remembers the location I'm on, even if the browser process dies horribly.

One that's easy to overlook - just open in google chrome.

I absolutely dislike the pdf viewer in Chrome. It fails at even the basic things a pdf reader should support. E.g., it lacks a concept of pages. You can't jump to a certain page. You can't even know the total number of pages. It doesn't support the pdf's TOC. For any pdf which contains more than one page it is therefore useless. I can't understand how the Google folks ever thought this was a good idea.

I prefer Okular or Evince for Desktop viewing and pdf.js for in browser viewing. pdf.js is a bit slow when loading the pdf. But the user interface is quite nice in my opinion.

On the other hand its one of the (or the? at least last I checked) only pdf readers on Linux which supports subpixel rendering of text and other vector content, which makes documents much more easily readable in my opinion.

I use mupdf. It has a quite minimal user interface but it's fast and has really good rendering. It's written by the ghostscript guys.

llpp is lovely: http://repo.or.cz/w/llpp.git

Just some general info: Evince and Okular (the successor to kpdf) both use poppler under the hood (which is maintained/released by the Okular maintainer), so their performance and behavior will be somewhat similar, though you can make a difference at the app level with things like tiled rendering and smarter prefetching. I'm not on top of how the two compare there, though. Okular also has pluggable backends and there's an in-development mupdf backend around.

Personally, i prefer "zathura". besides filling out forms it can do everything, with a very sleek ui and outstanding keybindings (vim-esque). I encourage you to try it :)

It's a fantastic piece of software. It can use different backends (mupdf or poppler) and it can also deal with DjVu files.

I also use Okular. It has recently gotten support for keeping multiple documents in tabs rather than separate windows. However, I find it to be slow when searching big documents and slow to render large graphics in a page.

I like apvlv. Very vim like. you can even split with :s and do a lot of cool stuff.

Especially for enterprise uses, there are a bunch of things that are only implemented in Adobe Reader, especially when it comes to forms, interactive elements, workflow etc.

PDF is only open in the sense that .docx and other MS Office formats are open - there is a spec, and you are allowed to implement it, but it is almost impossible to implement 100% of the features. Programs like Evince (Poppler) and Sumatra have come a long way. They are really excellent and read 95% of PDFs, many even faster and with less RAM usage than Adobe, and almost 100% of static PDFs ("print to PDF").

But for the occasional PDF form, if I don't want to print it and fill it out by hand, I have to use Adobe (Poppler sometimes gets the font size wrong so you don't see when you are overflowing a field, code that checks whether you filled it out correctly doesn't work, and highlighting that tells you which fields are for what kind of user to fill out is also often messed up).

Actually what I just do is to run Adobe Acrobat Pro in wine, which allows me to actually save arbitrary filled out forms.

Finally, one ironic benefit of the Adobe Reader is that it is distributed in binary form. If you are stuck on a Linux distribution a few versions back, you can just download and extract it to your home directory and run it from there. I realize that from-source or package manager purists might cringe at that thought, but it actually saved me a couple of times when I just had to print out a stubborn PDF (and couldn't ask the admin to kindly update my distribution at work...).

"there are a bunch of things that are only implemented in Adobe Reader"

this is actually accurate (for ex how many know that the reader has a Javascript execution engine integrated into it?) - when people say that there are other free 'alternatives' anyway, most miss out on this fact. Like you mentioned, good alternatives cover 95% of the use-cases, so almost no one discovers this by hitting a wall.

>for ex how many know that the reader has a Javascript execution engine integrated into it?

I always treated that as a bug, not a feature, and prefer non-adobe readers even on Windows.

Why? I would be interested to know. My point is that (1) it has its uses (2) there are acrobat features that non-adobe readers don't support.

I abhor PDFs with embedded media etc. And I have to use them. :(

I've been happily filling out forms with [evince](https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Evince) for the last few days. When I just need to read a pdf, I use [zathura](http://pwmt.org/projects/zathura/).

does it support digital signatures (i.e. from a Smart Card) within forms like Acrobat does? This seems to be required for a lot of PDF forms I've had to fill out in the past few years.

Unfortunately I have to correct page proofs of papers back from scientific publishers using Adobe Reader. This is going to make things tricky unless I have a WIndows machine.

UK government use some PDF forms that use Acrobats digital signatures and won't work properly on anything else I've tried. Don't know why they didn't create them as web forms/apps in the first place however.

Not for long. As of this week the official government line is that forms should be implemented on the web rather than in PDFs.

Any idea if PAYE real time will be rewritten to avoid using Adobe behind the scenes then?

>Don't know why they didn't create them as web forms/apps in the first place however.

Vendor lock-in?

Good riddance indeed. We don't need Adobe's proprietary software.

Okular[1] is the best PDF Reader on Linux. Enough said.

[1]http://okular.kde.org/

What does it provide that other options like zathura doesn't? Just asking; no offense intended.

Mostly KDE itegration and support for a really broad array of formats. Most people probably don't use it as such, but it's more of a general document viewer. (For example, you can actually open Microsoft .ppt files with it.)

It's a great pdf viewer, and has plenty of features, but so do most of the other well-known ones.

I love it, but I'd probably use something else if I wasn't using KDE as my desktop environment. It's lightweight if you're already loading all of the KDE libraries, but rather heavyweight otherwise.

I had been using it long before I started using KDE. There aren't many PDF Viewers that could do annotations and handle 1000 page PDFs. Evince which is a premier Gnome PDF application is pretty basic.

I will have to try Zathura but since KDE is my choice of desktop environment Okular comes natural. Long before I was using KDE, I needed a feature full PDF viewer and I found Okular. I mostly need annotations which it does fine. I have since then never felt a need for any other PDF viewer.

Well, zathura is great if you are a vim user, since it comes with all the key bindings and you can configure it like a lot of the tools out there with a dotfile. There's also support for djvu and other formats (although some distros do not have it by default, so you might need to compile it yourself). If you are not a vim user, you are gonna be disappointed, since its major feature is the vim thing imho.

That is nice for some users but again I feel like software including installation should be as easy as possible. We have actually lived in that era where we had to read documentation, install by compiling, and configure with dotfiles. I have had enough of it. I am happy with the basic functionality - read/fill form/annotate - that Okular provides in a dead simple interface and it comes with all format support pre-installed on all distributions that I have used. That's a win-win.

Here is one way to get it back

Source: http://askubuntu.com/questions/89127/how-do-i-install-adobe-...

sudo add-apt-repository "deb http://archive.canonical.com/ $(lsb_release -sc) partner" [you can use use 'precise', 'quantal', or 'raring' instead of the '$(lsb_release -sc)' command]

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install acroread

Also, Adobe still maintains an archive of all versions of Reader on their FTP site. Trivia - here is the OS2 version: ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/acrobatreader/os2/3.x/

The latest Linux release is at ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/reader/unix/9.x/9.5.5/enu/

I hope that there is no secret that the company is Adobe doing everything to ensure that its products were not released under Linux systems.

I really wonder where this attitude from Adobe comes from. I mean in the past they seemed always close with Apple. That could have explained the attitude. But then Apple refused to ship Flash and released alternatives to Adobe products. It really seems like a bad business attitude from Adobe.

Adobe wasn't really that close with Apple, Adobe's customers were. Adobe wanted their customers to move to Windows.

What you refer to as a bad attitude from Adobe is actually the biggest antitrust and corporate bullying scam in the entire history of the Internet, courtesy Steve Jobs. If you are really interested in figuring what happened, I invite you to check this Facebook page https:www.facebook.com/OccupyHTML5.

If you want my personal insider opinion on the facts, and what is wrong with both Adobe and Apple, check this posts and all its comments: https://www.facebook.com/occupyhtml5/posts/10151861946595679.

If you want to know what Jobs was scared of, and why he took such extreme measure to exterminate competition to iTunes and AppStore by killing the web, despite threat of international antitrust investigation by both FTC and EU Commission, check this Facebook note: https://www.facebook.com/notes/stephane-beladaci/one-code-an..., and this post: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10152254219025679.

I have some people who send me corrections via PDF annotations and notes. Neither Evince nor XPDF fully support these. Highlighted annotations particularly, Evince shows the highlight but doesn't show the annotation text (no icon to show it, hovering doesn't do anything either). I need Adobe Acrobat Reader for that.

My Poppler is a bit out of date, though it's not clear to me whether more recent versions of Poppler support highlighted annotations fully:

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=583377

What about the firefox built-in pdf reader or google docs?

The one built into Firefox is the one that always complains it cannot display the document properly.

Google Docs has the same behaviour for me as Evince on annoted-highlights: shows the highlight on the text, but doesn't show or provide anyway to view the associated annotation.

Edit: Remove IIRC - justed tested Google Docs again and that's the behaviour.

Kind of makes sense. I do not know anyone actually using it on Linux, there are much better alternatives. Only problematic part was PDF Forms, now probably obsolete.

Wasn’t it stuck at version 9 (or 10?) anyways, when all the other systems got 11 already?

The latest version that Adobe released for Linux and Unix was Adobe Reader 9. Adobe stopped supporting it on 6/26/2013. It's disappointing that they kept providing downloads of unsupported software until now. Red Hat put out an advisory in last year that said:

"Red Hat advises users to reconsider further use of Adobe Reader for Linux, as it may contain known, unpatched security issues... Red Hat will no longer provide security updates to these packages and recommends that customers not use this application on Red Hat Enterprise Linux effective immediately."

http://www.redhat.com/archives/rhsa-announce/2013-October/ms...

Pity, but it's a little surprise. They couldn't compile even their soft for Linux@x86_64 for several years.

If that is the crieria, then should we expect Google to drop Chrome for the Mac? That's still 32 bit.

I found these files on the net. Seems legit. (I said seems) https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B0fHzt9sGi2kRzM4R1JV...

I simply run virtubox+windows under Linux for adobe-form/turbotax etc that are too hard to do under Linux anyways. Hard to be 100% Linux still, but I'm close to 99% I think.

Beyond the pdf reader, what are the alternatives to the PDF format that can be shared with regular people and has the same qualities (widespread, wysiwyg, not editable, etc.) ?

Some of the qualities you described are not there in PDF so I'll just name a reasonable alternative.

HTML.

HTML is not WYSIWYG, and it's a pain in the butt to share an html document with specialty fonts, graphics, precise print layouts, etc in it.

Oh crap.

I was relying on that software to play the embedded media in PDF files issued by my school.

Anyone have a mirror, because I recently wiped my computer...

Good riddance! I stopped using it many years ago. The default PDF reader provided by the distro is good enough for my needs.

zathura is lightweight PDF reader with vim-like keybindings and vimperator/vimium style navigation.

Does the current Windows version work using Wine?

The people that use Linux are generally OSS enthusiasts who are not going to be willing to install a privative software. They problably didn't have that many users, and was not worth maintaining it.

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