Adobe Acrobat on Linux

According to Adobe the have their Adobe 7.0 reader for Linux now available. This is an excellent step forward for Linux gaining respect as an end-user platform, but in this case it is totally unneccessary.

One of the things I first discovered when switching to Linux is that some software may be more primitive but just as often it is superior to the software I’m used to running on Windows. A perfect example of this is viewing PDF files.

For years I’ve been stuck using Adobe Acrobat Reader to look at any PDF (portable document format) files that came my way. I tried to steer clear of them when possible because I knew that opening a pdf meant an investment in time and system resources. Whether I was viewing them in Internet Explorer’s embedded Acrobat Reader of opening them straight I’d have to watch as my ram filled up and everything slowed down. Then, when closing the PDF file I couldn’t count on all of my system resources returning to me.

For years I thought that the document format was simply a difficult to run and resource-hungry format. I believed that somehow PDFs were so complicated that they required a price for their viewing in time and effort. It wasn’t until I switched to Linux that I saw this was totally false.

In KDE there is a PDF viewer built into the file manager. If you click on the PDF it’ll instantly show you the contents of the file and let you browse through pages. It requires no time and no significant resources. When you’re done viewing the PDF you can just click ‘back’ and continue on your way.

PDF viewing is based on a technology called PostScript that Adobe invented a long time ago. They own the rights and nobody else makes a viewer that used PostScript. However, there’s an open-source technology called GhostScript that is able to emulate all the functions of PostScript. This is used heavily on GNU/Linux and allows for quick and easy PDF viewing.

After discovering that PDFs could be enjoyable to read I went to work the next day and uninstalled Adobe Acrobat from my Windows system. I found a neat little GhostScript for Windows program called GSview that gives me all the speed that PDFs should allow me to have.

Fore more information regarding GhostScript:
GhostScript questions and answers
Fast PDF viewer for Windows