Recommendation: Stop using Adobe Acrobat Reader : Greg Laden's Blog

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Recommendation: Stop using Adobe Acrobat Reader

Category: Technology
Posted on: April 23, 2009 3:22 PM, by Greg Laden

With all the Internet attacks that exploit Adobe Acrobat Reader people should switch to using an alternative PDF reader, a security expert said at the RSA security conference on Tuesday.
Of the targeted attacks so far this year, more than 47 percent of them exploit holes in Acrobat Reader while six vulnerabilities have been discovered that target the program, Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer of security firm F-Secure, said in a briefing with journalists.

source

But what are the alternatives?

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Comments

I installed Ghostscript (8.64) a while ago because I wanted to import some PDF documents into GIMP, but I didn't think to make it my default PDF reader. I'll have to give that a try.

Posted by: The Science Pundit | April 23, 2009 4:07 PM

For Mac users, the alternative is built right into the OS. You can open any pdf document in the built in "Preview" app, and you can save any document as a pdf via a checkbox in the standard Print dialog box.

Posted by: chezjake | April 23, 2009 4:28 PM

Skim is also a good choice for the mac.

Posted by: dean | April 23, 2009 4:33 PM

I am glad there are alternatives. I detest anything and everything from Adobe. None of their stuff works correctly and it is all full of bugs and holes and runs slow and crashed and hangs.....

Posted by: NewEnglandBob | April 23, 2009 5:29 PM

It isn't open source, but I've been using Foxit Reader for quite some time, and it works quite well - and considerably faster than Adobe.

Posted by: Dave Gill | April 23, 2009 6:18 PM

Well, the SuSE 11.1 distro I recently installed seems to have configured "evince" as the default reader for Firefox. It's a gnome thing and so far seems to work pretty well.

Posted by: liquidthinker | April 24, 2009 1:04 AM

Plus, Acrobat Reader (on Windows, anyway) is about the rudest, shonkiest app going. Constantly trying to update itself (and frequently throwing unhandled exceptions in the process, which is a real pain if you've got a debugger installed and you're trying to do something else) and insists on a reboot whenever it's updated, or even when you uninstall it. It's just rubbish.

Posted by: Dunc | April 24, 2009 4:48 AM

In a perfect world, OpenOffice would let you read PDFs...

Posted by: DuWayne | April 24, 2009 8:48 AM

hate acrobat with a passion, always have

I have to create PDF's on a daily basis for text documents and very large, dynamic maps. My favorite free (windows) programs are PDF-Xchange for viewing/editing and PDFill for adding headers/footers/page numbers. Foxit is perfect if you only need to view.

Posted by: jake | April 24, 2009 9:08 AM

DuWayne: An editable PDF import would be somewhat difficult because of the fundmental nature of PDF. Having the ability to edit (as in the Adobe software) in OO would be a huge investment of code better done as a stand alone but integrated program or a major add in that you can call up if you want.

Reading a PDF seems like a good idea, but in some ways, it's the same as reading a spread sheet. IOW, if you are in OO Writer and "open" a spreadsheet, it opens in Calc. OO could have a thusly integrated PDF reader.

Anyway, there has been a discussion of this for a while, and at one time there were plans to develop it, but they seem to have fizzled.

There is a PDF import extension project:
http://www.oooninja.com/2008/06/pdf-import-hybrid-odf-pdfs-extension-30.html

and

http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/project/pdfimport

but I doubt this is what you are looking for.

BTW, among the various PDF readers in Linux, some are way nicer than Adobe Reader will ever be. Also, there are numerous command line utilities to convert to and from PDF and variou formats, to break a PDF document into distinct pages, combine pages, etc. etc.

Posted by: Greg Laden | April 24, 2009 9:17 AM

I use Foxit reader. It's small, fast, and really safe. And it's free to boot.

Highly recommended to all.

Posted by: highschoolphysics | April 24, 2009 11:12 AM

Another vote for Foxit.

Posted by: Connie | April 24, 2009 2:37 PM