PDF Readers REVIEWS thotti; photocase.com

Adobe Reader 8.1 vs. Xpdf and PORTABLE POSSIBILITIES

The creator of the PDF format, Adobe, has released Adobe Reader 8.1. Xpdf, one of the older free PDF reader programs, still uses a interface, Does the proprietary display program offer more than free software Evince integrates seamlessly with the BY ERIK BÄRWALDT Gnome desktop. Besides the viewer alternatives Xpdf and Evince? function, Xpdf includes xpdf-utils, which give users the option of converting PDF he Portable Document Format PDF files and catered to all popular oper- documents to Postscript. In contrast, (PDF), based on the PostScript ating systems at the time. Acrobat Evince has a whole bunch of useful, Tpage description language, has Reader for DOS version 1.0 was released supplementary features, such as the abil- established itself as a standard for cross- in 1993, with a version for Macintosh, ity to fill out forms or copy document platform document publishing, and IBM OS/2, and other operating systems. content to the clipboard. At the same readers are available for any popular Because Acrobat Reader was distrib- time, Evince can display Postscript and . That said, the PDF uted free of charge and available for a DVI documents, in addition to PDF. format is not designed for publishing range of platforms, the PDF moved The greater the feature scope of documents that anyone can read. ahead of competition from the typical Evince, the more Adobe Reader lagged Pre-press is another important area word processing formats of the time. behind on , especially considering in which PDF is deployed. Professional Adobe landed another coup when it de- that each new version needed increas- Postscript printers and CTP machines veloped reader plugins for popular web ingly more resources. For example, process PDF documents directly, with browsers, allowing users to view PDF Adobe Reader occupies more than the use of preflight to check the layout of documents published on the burgeoning 100MB of disk space, and loading and a PDF document before publishing. The Internet directly in their browsers with- viewing of larger documents is slow. developers of the PDF format, Adobe out having to launch an external tool. Thankfully, Adobe seems to accept user Systems, had publishers and printing Although growth in software develop- feedback, and the new 8.1.1 version of companies in mind when they designed ment is amazingly dynamic, Adobe con- the Reader for Linux not only includes PDF and the Internet was still new. tinues to offer its Adobe Reader product a revamped look and a more attractive At the same time, Adobe made sure free of charge for all major platforms, GUI, it also brings many software im- that the new product was available to but as a proprietary tool, which inspired provements under the hood. most computer users. Acrobat Reader [1] development of the free PDF readers As you might expect, the new Reader was developed as a free display tool for Xpdf [2] and, later, Evince [3]. Whereas is not available from the repositories of

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Evince. Whereas the latter can still keep pace with files mainly comprising text and just a couple of graphics, the new Adobe Reader easily outpaces its free competitors with larger documents con- taining many graphics or images. Adobe Reader also handles go-tos or scrolling in the text far faster than its free competi- tors. All three candidates handle typical scale, rotate, and select commands at about the same speed, but Xpdf reminds users of the days of DOS with its out- dated Motif GUI, and it has the most unconventional controls of all three. Xpdf does not have any menubars. Basic steps such as loading files, saving, rotating, or quitting the program are trig- gered by right-clicking and selecting an item in a spartan menu that pops up in the program window. Only a couple of functions, such as go-tos and scaling of Figure 1: Xpdf likes to keep things uncluttered. the PDF document, use the iconbar at the bottom of the Xpdf window. The the leading Linux distributors, but only change depending on the length and iconbar also has a simple search func- from the Adobe website [1]. The down- content of the document. tion and a print function. Xpdf does not load size is about 50MB. One of the big- Compared with Xpdf and Evince, support features such as form manipula- gest changes is visible from the install. Adobe Reader is still fairly slow, but tion or modification, if permitted by the Adobe Reader versions up to and includ- whereas the predecessor, v7.0.9, took author of the PDF document. ing version 7.0.9 were available as ZIP about 20 seconds to launch on a 1.2GHz On the other hand, the Xpdf software archives only; users had to first unpack machine, the new version reduces the supports keyboard controls for the most and then install before running an exe- wait by about half. The time required to part. Users who are familiar with the cutable script. Now, Adobe offers RPM load a text document of several hundred keyboard shortcuts can improve speed and DEB binaries of the reader, giving pages with many graphics is another by doing without a mouse. In a multiple- users on many distributions a point and surprise and far shorter than previously. page document with headings, Xpdf dis- click installation option. The new Reader loads documents plays the table of contents on the left of When launched, the installation rou- faster than the programs Xpdf and the main window. Clicking on a heading tine drops around 120MB of data onto your disk. Running on Gnome, the appli- cation creates an Adobe Reader item in the Applications | Office menu (this is just Office on KDE). Users with alterna- tive desktops will typically need to cre- ate their own program launchers. Speed If you are familiar with older versions of Adobe Reader, you will be surprised how fast the application is the first time you launch it. Adobe has kept the license dialog on initial launch, but apart from this, the software has a completely new look. The GUI is tidy, with a single row of buttons for controlling the display and the menubar. The elements previously grouped at the bottom of the window have now been integrated with menus or with the buttonbar at the top. A couple of new buttons appear on the left of the program window; their appearance can Figure 2: Evince also has an uncluttered program window.

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bubble icons, re- across the board. Although all three test spectively, at the candidates have no trouble displaying bottom of the main simple PDF documents that do not con- window for these tain complex graphical or layout ele- two features. ments, the two free apps have difficulty Acrobat Connect displaying more complex PDF docs. – another innova- I used a PDF document created by tion – even allows Adobe PDF Library v7.0, which gener- users to share ates files in PDF v1.5. The document Adobe Reader doc- contains high-resolution images and uments with other overlaid text, along with transparent users connected by photos, special layout elements, and means of the Con- shading. Although Xpdf and Evince use nect service. For different rendering engines to display the this to happen, documents, the errors are the same with Acrobat Connect complex PDF files. sets up its own The free viewers display graphical “rooms” in which boxes with a broad black border instead the initiator can of shadowing. Xpdf and Evince also invite other users have difficulty with images that trans- to assemble for a parently overlay text elements; they dis- virtual meeting. play the image, but without transpar- Although the ency, which can seriously affect read- Figure 3: Xpdf’s rendering of complex documents (right) is less read and spell- ability (Figure 3). realistic than Acrobat Reader’s (left). check functions do Text boxes over graphics with back- not currently work grounds that should be transparent are takes you straight to the page in ques- on Linux, Adobe has already added displayed as white or dark boxes by the tion (Figure 1). menu items to support these features. free PDF readers. In my example (Fig- Evince has functionality similar to ures 3 and 4), a dark box is shown Xpdf, plus a couple of additional fea- Clarity around the red arrow. tures, including the ability to fill out The display quality of the documents is The original Adobe Reader is the only forms. If you enable the Side bar func- an important criterion for users. Again, program capable of displaying complex tion in the View menu, Evince will show the new Adobe Reader scores points documents correctly, and it now you a TOC or achieves the same file-loading speed as thumbnails for the the free candidates. document. Left-clicking a Conclusions thumbnail takes If you need a tool for viewing documents you to the page mainly comprising text such as guides or (see Figure 2). HOWTOs, all three programs will work. Adobe Reader Professionals who use PDF documents has the biggest col- with many graphical elements and a lection of custom complex layout for presentation pur- functions. Users poses will find no alternative to Adobe can click the icons Reader. The original Reader avoids ren- in the main win- dering errors with more complex layout dow to display ta- elements. At the same time, the new ver- bles of content and sion 8.1.1 shows evidence of careful de- thumbnails. Also, velopment, including a more usable and Reader has a lim- attractive GUI. It’s faster, and it offers ited scope for ma- features that the free readers lack. I nipulating docu- ments, such as INFO viewing file attach- [1] Adobe Reader (download): ments and viewing http:// www. adobe. com/ products/ and editing com- acrobat/ readstep2_allversions. html ments; users can [2] Xpdf: http:// www. foolabs. com/ xpdf/ click on the paper Figure 4: Evince (right) also fails to display complex documents as [3] Evince: http:// www. gnome. org/ clip and speech- well as Adobe Reader (left). projects/ evince/

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