Peter's Blog

Don't get (5). Given you have no choice but to use pdf you may as well take 7. Ok I know sometimes the earlier products are better. But mostly not.

It's an interesting argument: since I am forced to view pdf files because people insist on using them, I should stop moaning and install every new version of Acrobat Reader and all the bloat from Adobe's marketing partners as they exploit their monopoly.

Since I am at home I can try Foxit Reader a nice pdf reader, free for non-commercial use. Looks good so far.

I also tried gsview which is free but nags you until you register and you don't seem to be able to skip registering. They have every right to insist on people registering their software and I have every right to refuse to register on principle and use something else.

Peter

You could just ignore the bloatware. If you do not use it then you are providing no encouragement for them to include it. Once that is done you just need to see which of the products give you most of your time for you. I'd say just using 7 does that for me... who fills a hard disk or uses all of their clock cycles these days anyway.

I didn't buy a 40g disk and a 1.8g processor to make plenty of spare capacity for stuff I never asked for, don't need and don't want. I know you are a Microsoft fan so you won't understand.

And the 'if I don't use it I won't encourage them' argument can be applied to spam: only 1% of people might need to use it to make it viable.

Have you heard about the Sony Rootkit Debacle?. The BigCo's are relying on people's ignorance and apathy.

Peter

I would not say I was a fan. But you are correct I do not understand the anti Microsoft view. Life seems to short. Did you check out World Wind from NASA? It requests a default 1GB cache but you can easily ask for much more to fill all of that empty disk space.

BTW the free PDF readers... how do the companies that make them make money. Free stuff has to be paid for so the employees can eat.

Spam. Analogy. Um. Never mentioned spam :)

And yes Sony were bad...

What annoyed me most about Acrobat Reader installing PrintMe was the fact that I found it in the Start menu and wondered what it was, why it was there, how it got there. I don't want extra rubbish on my pc, adding complexity I don't want, taking any of my cpu cycles, taking up a slot in my start menu, reducing the reliability of my installation in any conceivable manner.

Another thing about CPU cycles, my work pc is still a Pentium 2 450, it doesn't have that many cpu cycles to spare. Should I go to my boss and ask for an upgrade so that I can run the latest version of Acrobat reader?

Free pdf readers: the one I tried has a free version and a paid for version with a few more features. The free one is good enough.

Spam. As a defence that argument, me making an analogy and you saying you never mentioned the analogous concept, should be here

The funniest aspect of the sony thing is how you can simply put tape on the CD to kill the DRM.

Peter

A bit like religion really. You just have to respect the other guys choice.

Don't get me started on religion.

Peter

Lets not. Although I think we may have more points of agreement.

Deadset. Adobe Acrobat is a great concept poorly executed. The automatic update so often enabled at schools, libraries etc crashes out IE and FF across the board. It is atrocious. It is the bane of my life. I live in a country where the HTML function on Google is blocked for some reason (as is wikipedia), so there is no safe option...

I HATE ACROBAT

I could not agree with you more!

I have spent the last two hours (Yes, 2 hours) saving a PDF for my client. Oh no... I created the file in Photoshop. What does that mean, you might ask? Well, since Photoshop likes to save PDF's at 100MB a piece... you will have to then open it within Acrobat Professional (Yep, you ACTUALLY have to pay money to use this carp). THEN it takes Acrobat Professional an additional 20 minutes to compact the PDF. It is THAT slow. And no, I do not have a carpy computer... though the PDF its self was quite complex with hundreds of vectors within it.

Alright... now that I have created this PDF, why not open it in Firefox? NOOOOOO. It takes a few minutes to load. Every time you wish to look at another part of the image, it has to LLLLLOOOOOAAAADDDD. Then, here comes the fun part (dun dun dun...) CLOSING the PDF in Firefox! Weeeee. There goes another 5 minutes, while my entire computer just STOPS doing anything. (Note: During this time, it is not even processing)

I am sorry for my rant. I just HATE PDFs SO MUCH, and I have WASTED the past 2 hours sitting here, waiting, and waiting. (Meanwhile I cannot do anything else such as check my email)

I totally agree with you. I hate pdf files. I absolutely hate them. My FireFox just crashed and I googled for 'I hate PDF'. What a stupid file format. What does it stand for? Portable File Format? Are they kidding? Did they ever tried to read any PDF file on any PDA?

I haven't even bothered to try it with a PDA. Apparently the adobe system uses a desktop app to reformat the page for download to the pda. Sounds like too much hassle just to read brochures.

Peter

God f**k yes i hate PDF, god damnit! companies make you use that acrobat reader crap to "view" there documents. and shezz its soo hard to find these days. everything i have found on the internet you ether have to "pay for" or have to download, then you get an error message because the damn thing doesent work on your OS, GoD!!

My company has decided to scan all documents to PDF files. The documents are signed in ink by managers etc, the document is scanned and put on a file server. The people that decided on this think that the signatures cannot be faked because they themselves have no clue on how to do it.

So the pdfs are just big bitmaps, the contents cannot be indexed or searched for text, you cannot copy and paste text and the files are much bigger than plain word documents.

Peter

And I hate it when people publish papers/pages on their website as PDFs. I am not interested in downloading anything - gimme my HTML!

YES DOWN WITH PDF.

P.S.

What would really tick me off is a whole website as a pdf file.

I would scream.

Reason 6

applications or forms that you have to print, fill out by hand, then scan back in to send to anyone. this defeats the entire purpose of a computer in the first place. why can't you just type on and save a PDF? I'd rather deal with a word document at least if not HTML.

totally worthless.

THANK YOU PDFs ARE GARBAGE

Right on. Adobe sucks sucks sucks. Acrobat reader has NEVER been reliable. I wonder how many millions if not billions of computer slowdowns/crashes it has caused. Adobe should be shut down.

I find that the most annoying about acrobat reader is that whn your searching google and you select something, without realising that it's pdf, you get a huge wait for the reader to load, folowed by prompts to update it and then your computer often crashes. Other annoying things are that you can't highlight text: it just acts like an image, and it doesn't scroll untill you let go!! why??!!. Adobe is generally a good company with software like Photoshop and Dreamweaver but Acrobat Reader has always been Rubbish!!!

Adobe Acrobat lock ups - I've got professional version 7.0 - my computer was locking up - after deleting my processes - I found it was the adobe updater - I do like .pdfs - I hate the readers/writers.

I'm not very fluent in computer-English, but I'm very relieved to find people, who think what I think for years: Pdf-format is not only rubbish, slow and inefficient, it is also impertinent: While downloading, it ist constantly intruding into my files and creating it's own files in my laptop. In German the file is called "Eigene eBooks". I don't want any such file on my laptop!! Normally it's worms and virusses who intrude into my system and change something. Damned, why do we allow pdf files to do stuff like that, only because we would like to read something in the net?!

I hate Acrobat Reader (and pdfs) too! Just googled for "I hate pdf" after yetanother wait for adobe reader to load, and then a lot of nagsnags nags about upgrade to a newer version that makes it, if possible, even more bloated. WHY do people make documents in a paperprint format instead of a lightweight format like text or html? Even microsofts wordformat is better for online documents...

Thanks for your blog, I clearly can see that I'm not alone now.

I freakin' HATE pdf files ... adobe ... all of it. SLOW and, worse, ... when exactly were computer files supposed to save a bunch of damn trees? Ah, yes, the so-called "paperless office" I've been reading about since the late 80s. Er, the answer is: not in our lifetime. In my job, I need to be able to gather, copy and post information quickly and reliably. I get pdf invitations and other documentation with information I need daily. But, I can't highlight and copy from a pdf ... hell no ... I have to kill yet another damn tree, print the damn thing and then re-type all the information into the calendar and other useable formats every day. These pdf's absolutely suck. No search. No copy. It's BS. I must have personally killed 10,000 trees since I was 24 years old. I'm only 45 now so I can't think how many forests will be dead due to one little assistant. Paperless office? That is the same thing as George Jetson's dogwalk ... a figment of somenone's imagination.

Add me to the list of frustrated with PDF people. Thing that is healing me this moment I found here: http://mydigitallife.info/2007/06/17/disable-pdf-from-opening-in-web-browser-ie-firefox-opera-safari/

well, PDF's are the worst file format ever. I decided to search "I hate pdf" in google after I had lots of wasted hours in converting pdfs to jpgs, so I can put the content in a website. It's a shame for really serious companies that they use pdf to present or send over their company logo. I'm doing a new website, and 11 out of 30 companies gave pdf for their logo, its disaster and unfriendly for web development.

Conclusion: Adobe is such a very good company, CS3 studio is great especially dreamweaver ( still all load slow ), but I beleive such a company can either improve this pdf format or else give it the dead sentence, and make it just sad history.

my 2 cents..

Yes, I know people who think pdf is a useful graphic format. I have to take screenshots from the pdf reader. It's NOT a good way to transfer graphics.

I googled "i hate Pdf files" and found this. Yeah, they make my computer crash or freeze. they take a long time to download. I hate people who use pdf files. And even worse are people who use pdf and like it. I'm going over to rage.com now to continue my rant.

I am joining the I-Hate-PDF crowd. I am forced to use PDF files daily in my work. Typical of Adobe products, I would say. Apparently, you have no control over page margins, etc. when printing from Acrocrap Reader.

I agree with the concept of a portable document format. (You know what else is portable...paper!). In this world wide era documents need to zip back and forth. Sometimes with pictures and other information. But for the love of all that is unholy, WHY CAN'T I EDIT OR CHANGE THE DOCUMENTS AS I SEE FIT? I should be able to look at it, change things and send it back. So many employment applications are in PDF...but you can't fill them in and send them back? Why? Because Adobe wants you to buy Acrobat. I call BS. Go to hell Adobe. I'll never buy Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Acrobat, Flash, or any other crappy products you make. I'm pretty sure PDF really stands for Proprietary Dumbass Frustrating. Too bad there isn't a decent OPEN format like PDF.

I agree PDF is the most terrible format and a good example of egocentric marketting.

How in earth is it possible so many companies prefer using PDF as the format for internal docu's. I blame the misleading extention Portable digital format of wathever it stands for, anyway it's just total crap, like others confirmed, you just can't do anything within a pdf, it's even impossible to copy and past regular text, what's the use of that?

if a company is looking for a very good tool to make efficient and searchable dynamic linked documentation and in the mean while in a very simple way keeping track of all changes made whitin the document, there's really only one tool which does it all: it's called Help and Manual! This tool gives you the advantage to centralize and render your info in the format you like (yes also in crapy PDF for those who want to, not me!!!). H&M uses only one resource and this can be run or edited over a network by 2or more people at the same time!!! . H&M let's you render the docu's in every format you want. (html; chm, hlp, rtf, Pdf, ebook,...) plus and that's the strength of H&M all links are dynamic: if you change one topic, all redericting links will be updated as well.

Now i'm not a vendor or something like that, I just can't believe Adobe still argue's that PDF's are a good alternative for simple plain HTML pages. Did you guys know that Adobe 10 years ago actualy wanted to make PDF the standard format for all internet page traffic because in pdf you can combine all kind of data. well, i'd say, if it was userfreindly it mlight have worked! now i just boycot every PDF file because it's so daim crappy, unstable, way to much secured and simply cost more time than anything else!

screw PDF's!

I hate PDF files. I avoid them like the plague. If you want to read the text comfortably you can only see a small portion of text, and if you want to see a reasonable amount of text it has to be tiny and illegible.

HTML and word documents seem to be able to display comfortably on my screen, but the fixed dimensions of a PDF page and the lack of the dynamic flow from one page to another is a real problem for on screen legibility.

Then it takes a million years to scroll, open, change windows... You can't easily change the fonts or anything, and a lot of PDF files don't even let you select the text.

PDF files are no good.