Thankfully I don’t use either of them
I hope an Adobe/Microsoft merge does not come to pass. The clear superiority of Adobe Acrobat pro for ease and power of editing pdf files over any application that Linux can offer (for pdf handling) is one of the main reasons a few of my colleagues (including my wife) refuse to use Linux.
My fear would be in such a merger, Microsoft would find a way to update the Adobe imposed ‘pdf’ standard such that Linux would be even less capable in handling pdf files.
If Adobe Acrobat pro is so superior, why do so few people use its facilities? I can produce far more sophisticated PDFs with LyX than I have ever come across produced by any other software.
I doubt the merger would make the difference you suggest because so few people use the facilities already available for PDFs and, if Microsoft/Adobe took PDFs in a different direction, there has already been sufficient development within the FOSS community to make their changes a distraction like IE6 rather than a contribution to what people want to do. That said, I would hope MS would have learned from the IE6 debacle that that is not the helpful way to proceed.
Many people use the software. I think I can probably name a dozen people who (legally) use it at home and easily point to over 100 at the office.
Edit - I should add with it being MS-Windows software, and very expensive, I also know many more home users who have copies where there are pirated hacks available to work around Adobe’s registration codes. It is a VERY popular piece of software amongst home and professional users.
Thats great. Never the less, Adobe Acrobat Pro is a big success for Adobe.
Note, I am not an MS-Windows fan. Linux has been my main OS at home since 1998.
I wish this were so, but in fact MANY use the pdf format and Adobe Acrobat pro.
Adobe Acrobat Pro is NOT popular because of its capability to ‘make’ original PDFs. Rather it is popular because its superior capability to EDIT and markup existing PDFs.
I know there’s anti-trust laws all over the world, that the EU has become quite strict about do’s and don’ts for M$, Apple and the others. Yet a long struggle might occur where M$ includes Flashplayer in Win12 (or whatever Longhorn they’ll reinvent), and stop delivering it as a piece of software. That way we would not only need flash-player to view websites in full, we would need the complete M$ OS…
I’m aware of the fact, that being paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after us 
There was no IE6 debacle. It ruled the browser market and Microsoft still has over 60% marketshare IRT browsers. A majority of users have Migrated off of IE6 anyways.
If IE6 was such a debacle, it would have been rendering websites wrong, but instead Firefox, etc. were rendering them wrong because developers were developing for IE6. Microsoft can afford to put proprietary extensions in some of their software because the have the developer backing to do it. Also, you can’t always wait for the next revision of a standard to introduce a feature that developers and/or users want. If that was the case, there would be hardly any innovation in computing (which is largely driven by standards).
GCC has proprietary extensions, but I don’t hear any GCC users crying that Visual Studio users can’t compile their code, for example.
In any case, Flash and AIR vs. Silverlight are more worthy of discussion than PDF. Seriously. PDF? You people are really worrying about Acrobat?
A Layout Markup system with PDF export capabilities cannot even began to compete with Acrobat when it is paired with the various DTP, Word Processing, etc. applications on Windows. “Printing to PDF” is only half the story. It goes way beyond that.
That’s like saying one video codec is better than another even though it uses 30% more bandwidth to deliver 30% less quality streaming…
Also IRT IE6. The issue isn’t really IE6, it’s Windows XP. Lots of users just won’t upgrade off an OS that “just works.” IE6 doesn’t even come pre-installed on Vista or 7, and you can’t “downgrade” from IE 7/8 to IE6. IE9 is looking so good and fast that it’s almost a reason to upgrade off of XP, Lol.
Also, there are lots of pirated versions of XP out there, and if your Pirated XP cannot pass WGA Verification, you cannot upgrade off of IE6.
Perhaps Microsoft should have shipped IE7 as part of SP3, BUT… Corporations who have Intranet Sites built for IE6 would have been in a rage…
I wonder how many new antitrust suits that would lead to.
If IE6 was so good, why did MS change the way things were rendered in IE7, IE8 and IE9 and thereby set up a whole series of incompatibilities within its own family of browsers? Why has MS been pleading with users to dump IE6?
At someone who frequently has to typeset things produced on Windows I have had enough grief from Word to know that it is a disaster for anyone wanting to do quality work; many of its features are self-inconsistent and though, in theory, it has the features to produce high quality output, these are so obscure that hardly anyone knows about or uses them.
My earlier point was similar; I see many PDFs produced by Windows programs but I have yet to see one where, for example, clicking on a chapter or section in the contents list took me to the chapter or section in the document. I assume that such facilities are part of the PDF specification as they have been available in Linux for several years. So why don’t the users of Windows programs use these facilities or are they, like so many facilities in Word, so obscure that no one even knows they exist?
On Sat, 09 Oct 2010 07:36:01 +0000, john hudson wrote:
> My earlier point was similar; I see many PDFs produced by Windows
> programs but I have yet to see one where, for example, clicking on a
> chapter or section in the contents list took me to the chapter or
> section in the document. I assume that such facilities are part of the
> PDF specification as they have been available in Linux for several
> years. So why don’t the users of Windows programs use these facilities
> or are they, like so many facilities in Word, so obscure that no one
> even knows they exist?
They’re more commonly found in programs like FrameMaker. You can
probably do it in Word, but most people don’t use Word for that level of
publishing work - or if they do (as I have done in the past), the
templates are set up to be interpreted by the typesetting equipment for
print books where hyperlinks tend to be pretty useless. 
Jim
–
Jim Henderson
openSUSE Forums Administrator
Forum Use Terms & Conditions at http://tinyurl.com/openSUSE-T-C
On 2010-10-08 10:06, john hudson wrote:
>
> If Adobe Acrobat pro is so superior, why do so few people use its
> facilities? I can produce far more sophisticated PDFs with LyX than I
> have ever come across produced by any other software.
Nobody installs it in linux, because it does not exist. There is no linux version.
And in windows, I have seen large companies installing it by default on every computer. Few users?
Not at all.
In windows, they do things with PDFs that simply can not be done in Linux. At least, we can use the
PDFs the generate in linux with the adobe reader - no, no open product is capable of reliably render
PDFs with forms like those my goverment provides - so if this merger goes ahead, it would means I
would have to switch to Windows in order to fill those forms.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.2 x86_64 “Emerald” at Telcontar)
So far, I am happy with Okular to view PDFs and its form filling capabilities (even though it is not perfect sometimes).
I think you missed my point; I know that lots of people use programs like Acrobat, FrameMaker, Distiller to create PDFs - I read them every day. But I have yet to come across a PDF generated by a Windows program that begins to use the features built into the PDF specification. That said, my work doesn’t tend to take me into PDF forms but I see pretty well every other type of PDF in the course of my work.
I do generate PDF from my Java programs using itext library. itext is a very powerful library that can be used for creating complex and sophisticated PDF files featuring advanced options.
I think I started the discussion about Adobe Acrobat Pro and pdfs and why that was a concern wrt any Microsoft Merger. And the point was no Linux application comes close to Adobe Acrobat pro in providing EDIT capabilities. Not CREATE capabilities, which was the point you first raised. EDIT capabilities. I can’t be more clear.
The ability to CREATE PDF files was NEVER my point. Business NEED the capability to EDIT PDF files. The capability to edit to a HIGH standard. Many users with home businesses NEED the capability to edit PDF files. And no other application is as good as Adobe Acrobat pro in doing this. Definitely no Linux application is as good.
There are some pure Linux applications that provide some edit capabilities in this area, but they are a dismal distant second. Adobe Acrobat Pro is what I would term a “killer application” for many (not all) users, keeping them on MS-Windows.
This Linux apps (that can edit) are making inroads, but if Microsoft and Adobe merge, I can see them moving the bar/specifications such that the Linux apps never catch up for EDIT capabilities.
On 2010-10-09 22:06, oldcpu wrote:
>
> john_hudson;2235743 Wrote:
>> I think you missed my point…I think I started the discussion about Adobe Acrobat Pro and pdfs and
> why that was a concern wrt any Microsoft Merger. And the point was no
> Linux application comes close to Adobe Acrobat pro in providing EDIT
> capabilities. Not CREATE capabilities, which was the point you first
> raised. EDIT capabilities. I can’t be more clear.
Yes, it is true, editing is very far behind in linux. Not only that, but other advanced features,
that start with linked indexes (OOo can create those) but go far beyond. Like writing a form and
submitting it online, or filling fields with calculations based on some other fields (a tax form in
PDF). PDFs can contain multimedia, or code.
However, many PDFS are really simple and render OK with any browser. But I have to work with PDFs
that view very badly with both okular and evince (yes, I created Bugzillas about those).
So yes, edit is one feature we lack, but there are many others. I know because I came across such
PDFs and compared.
> This Linux apps (that can edit) are making inroads, but if Microsoft
> and Adobe merge, I can see them moving the bar/specifications such that
> the Linux apps never catch up for EDIT capabilities.
Yes, that’s is what I’m afraid of. That and the other advanced features, that at least work in the
reader. The reader itself could disappear.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.2 x86_64 “Emerald” at Telcontar)
I have never disputed the fact that Acrobat provides editing facilities that are not available in Linux. My comment was that none of the people who use these facilities and claim they are essential for their work actually use the facilities in the PDF specification to make the PDFs they produce more easily readable for users. My question therefore is: is this because the applications do not take full advantage of the PDF specification or because they are so user-unfriendly that those using them are not aware that they could make their PDFs more user-friendly for users?
Because IE6 uses many of the same proprietary extensions that IE has been introducing since the early versions. This is part of the reason why IE became a problem for people who used non-Microsoft OSes or non-Microsoft browser. So many websites were coded for IE and it’s proprietary extensions that it broke those websites in other browsers like Netscape and Opera.
Microsoft pushing people away from IE6 has nothing to do with IE6 being terrible: it was probably the most successful browser going by the marketshare it attained. It’s because the web in general is more standardized these days and they are moving to those standards. If lots of people continue to use IE6, then developers will continue to develop for IE6, and that will continue to create problems for people using later versions of IE, Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Mozilla, etc.
But it was not a debacle. Things are just moving in a different direction these days. Windows Me was a debacle (and completely unnecessary with Windows 2000 existing back then, IMO), and Vista pre-SP1 was a debacle. IE6 was not.
And I’ll reiterate: The people who loathed IE6 the most were not people like you. They were developers who had to maintain literally multiple versions of their websites (or insert a bunch of extra markup to handle different browsers) because IE6 used proprietary tags. The fact that Windows XP was out SO LONG didn’t really help, since I doubt Microsoft would have let IE6 stagnate if they had released a new OS in, say, 2004 or so (a non-server OS, not many people surf the web on production servers). Perhaps try to jump off of that bandwagon. It would be appreciated.
At someone who frequently has to typeset things produced on Windows I have had enough grief from Word to know that it is a disaster for anyone wanting to do quality work; many of its features are self-inconsistent and though, in theory, it has the features to produce high quality output, these are so obscure that hardly anyone knows about or uses them.
Well what professional typesetter uses Microsoft Word? Word is good for creating documents. You don’t do Newspapers, etc. in Microsoft Word - the same way you don’t do progessional Graphics Design with Paint.NET. Word can print to PDF through the Acrobat distiller, however, and many features of Acrobat (missing in competing products) are exposed through the distiller. Also, Acrobat cannot be matched for editing PDF files - nothing else comes close.
My earlier point was similar; I see many PDFs produced by Windows programs but I have yet to see one where, for example, clicking on a chapter or section in the contents list took me to the chapter or section in the document. I assume that such facilities are part of the PDF specification as they have been available in Linux for several years. So why don’t the users of Windows programs use these facilities or are they, like so many facilities in Word, so obscure that no one even knows they exist?
Lolwut? You can create a Word Document where the Index and Contents take you to the correct section. Actually, you can just run it through Acrobat and it will correct anything for you if missing (creating an entire heirarchy in the tab where you can go to Chapters, Sections, Sub-Sections). Acrobat can even do this on PDFs that you don’t have the original document for (i.e. if an eBook that came with a paper book is missing that, you can run it through Acrobat and it will add it to the document: Chapers, Sections, Sub-Sections, etc.). Index will work by page number, etc.
Some people are just terrible at creating PDF documents and miff up the navigation. If they edit the bookmarks and miff them up, that’s not Acrobat’s fault. I know all the way back to Acrobat 7 Pro you can have it automatically generate the navigation, and it works pretty much flawlessly.
There are tons of eBooks on the Web created with Windows Applications and/or Adobe Acrobat. If that was an issue, I don’t think Acrobat would have continued to be successful - don’t you think?
There is also the issue of copy-protected and password-protected PDFs, which Acrobat does better than everything else. Then there are forms, etc. One of the most essential applications to install on a computer these days is Adobe Acrobat Reader (no, Ocular, etc. won’t cut it even on Linux). Proper PDF functionality is THAT essential, especially if you get important PDFs sent to you (contracts, student loan info, Income Tax documents, etc.).