
Acrobat Reader for Linux removed - decafbad
http://get.adobe.com/reader/otherversions/
======
parennoob
The solutions here seem to be split into two camps:

1\. Use Okular / Evince / Poppler / Sumatra / Zathura / whatever (actually, I
think you might begin to see the problem already).

2\. Use Acrobat Reader in Wine.

Neither of these is going to appeal to my family members whose idea of a good
time is not installing something via "Software Center" and spending ages
tweaking the configuration to work properly, so they can use a half-speed
version of Acrobat Reader on Windows. They will probably end up sticking with
Mac or Windows.

Which is perfectly fine, because no one is forcing them to use Linux. I just
want to point out that stuff like this totally kills the idea of "Linux for
the everyday user". First you _have_ to offer them a lot of the stuff which
they are accustomed to (a decent document editor, a decent PDF reader), then
slowly increase their awareness about software freedoms. It is unfortunate
that most FSF zealots end up reversing this order, and driving away the common
user.

Solutions? I'm not sure, maybe someone can weigh in. The best I can think of
right now is for organizations like Canonical and Red Hat who might be
interested in promoting Desktop Linux to pay for Adobe to release and support
Acrobat on their distros. Either that, or actively put in some sort of a
translation chart in the OS for common users "Acrobat <-> Evince" or such.

~~~
ommunist
I upvote this. Especially the Wine option. IMHO it should be advertised that
"You can run Windows programs on Linux by using Wine".

------
streptomycin
Are there any Linux PDF readers that work as well? For instance I reported
this bug
[https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=628920](https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=628920)
years ago but the example PDF I included still looks horrible in the latest
Evince. So I typically keep a copy of Adobe Reader installed to deal with
files like that, but I'd love to replace it with something open source.

~~~
naner
Your primary choices in renderers are the following:

    
    
        - XPDF - the OG *nix PDF renderer.
    
        - Poppler (fork of xpdf). Probably most featureful,
          different features supported among different 
          implementations (e.g. Evince and Okular appear to 
          behave differently and have different feature sets).
    
        - Mupdf, newer code base, made by Ghostscript team. Only 
          supports rendering PDFs and XPS. No fancy javascript 
          or form support.
    
        - PDF.js via Mozilla browsers.
    
        - PDFium via Chrome-based browsers.

~~~
abrowne
PDF.js is not limited to Firefox. Here's a Chrome extension:
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pdf-
viewer/oemmndc...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pdf-
viewer/oemmndcbldboiebfnladdacbdfmadadm)

------
drdaeman
Good riddance, I guess? I believe there isn't any shortage of good PDF viewers
for GNU/Linux.

~~~
xavixavi
What PDF readers on linux are 'best recommended'? I compared acroread with
evince and kpdf in the past and found that acroread was the most parsimonious
in use of resources (especially RAM on large documents). Have not repeated the
comparison recently, so will be glad to hear about recommendations with more
recent experiences with large documents with images.

~~~
replax
Personally, i prefer "zathura". besides filling out forms it can do
everything, with a very sleek ui and outstanding keybindings (vim-esque). I
encourage you to try it :)

~~~
nextos
It's a fantastic piece of software. It can use different backends (mupdf or
poppler) and it can also deal with DjVu files.

------
donniezazen
Okular[1] is the best PDF Reader on Linux. Enough said.

[1][http://okular.kde.org/](http://okular.kde.org/)

~~~
farresito
What does it provide that other options like zathura doesn't? Just asking; no
offense intended.

~~~
jofer
Mostly KDE itegration and support for a really broad array of formats. Most
people probably don't use it as such, but it's more of a general document
viewer. (For example, you can actually open Microsoft .ppt files with it.)

It's a great pdf viewer, and has plenty of features, but so do most of the
other well-known ones.

I love it, but I'd probably use something else if I wasn't using KDE as my
desktop environment. It's lightweight if you're already loading all of the KDE
libraries, but rather heavyweight otherwise.

~~~
donniezazen
I had been using it long before I started using KDE. There aren't many PDF
Viewers that could do annotations and handle 1000 page PDFs. Evince which is a
premier Gnome PDF application is pretty basic.

------
wiseleo
Here is one way to get it back

Source: [http://askubuntu.com/questions/89127/how-do-i-install-
adobe-...](http://askubuntu.com/questions/89127/how-do-i-install-adobe-
acrobat-reader)

sudo add-apt-repository "deb
[http://archive.canonical.com/](http://archive.canonical.com/) $(lsb_release
-sc) partner" [you can use use 'precise', 'quantal', or 'raring' instead of
the '$(lsb_release -sc)' command]

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install acroread

Also, Adobe still maintains an archive of all versions of Reader on their FTP
site. Trivia - here is the OS2 version:
ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/acrobatreader/os2/3.x/

The latest Linux release is at
ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/reader/unix/9.x/9.5.5/enu/

------
bricss
I hope that there is no secret that the company is Adobe doing everything to
ensure that its products were not released under Linux systems.

~~~
fafner
I really wonder where this attitude from Adobe comes from. I mean in the past
they seemed always close with Apple. That could have explained the attitude.
But then Apple refused to ship Flash and released alternatives to Adobe
products. It really seems like a bad business attitude from Adobe.

~~~
mpweiher
Adobe wasn't really that close with Apple, Adobe's customers were. Adobe
wanted their customers to move to Windows.

------
pjakma
I have some people who send me corrections via PDF annotations and notes.
Neither Evince nor XPDF fully support these. Highlighted annotations
particularly, Evince shows the highlight but doesn't show the annotation text
(no icon to show it, hovering doesn't do anything either). I need Adobe
Acrobat Reader for that.

My Poppler is a bit out of date, though it's not clear to me whether more
recent versions of Poppler support highlighted annotations fully:

[https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=583377](https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=583377)

~~~
danford
What about the firefox built-in pdf reader or google docs?

~~~
pjakma
Google Docs has the same behaviour for me as Evince on annoted-highlights:
shows the highlight on the text, but doesn't show or provide anyway to view
the associated annotation.

Edit: Remove IIRC - justed tested Google Docs again and that's the behaviour.

------
qwerta
Kind of makes sense. I do not know anyone actually using it on Linux, there
are much better alternatives. Only problematic part was PDF Forms, now
probably obsolete.

------
claudius
Wasn’t it stuck at version 9 (or 10?) anyways, when all the other systems got
11 already?

------
sciurus
The latest version that Adobe released for Linux and Unix was Adobe Reader 9.
Adobe stopped supporting it on 6/26/2013\. It's disappointing that they kept
providing downloads of unsupported software until now. Red Hat put out an
advisory in last year that said:

"Red Hat advises users to reconsider further use of Adobe Reader for Linux, as
it may contain known, unpatched security issues... Red Hat will no longer
provide security updates to these packages and recommends that customers not
use this application on Red Hat Enterprise Linux effective immediately."

[http://www.redhat.com/archives/rhsa-
announce/2013-October/ms...](http://www.redhat.com/archives/rhsa-
announce/2013-October/msg00003.html)

------
dozzie
Pity, but it's a little surprise. They couldn't compile even their soft for
Linux@x86_64 for several years.

~~~
kweinber
If that is the crieria, then should we expect Google to drop Chrome for the
Mac? That's still 32 bit.

------
decafbad
I found these files on the net. Seems legit. (I said seems)
[https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B0fHzt9sGi2kRzM4R1JV...](https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B0fHzt9sGi2kRzM4R1JVeER4Xzg&usp=drive_web)

------
ausjke
I simply run virtubox+windows under Linux for adobe-form/turbotax etc that are
too hard to do under Linux anyways. Hard to be 100% Linux still, but I'm close
to 99% I think.

------
johnchristopher
Beyond the pdf reader, what are the alternatives to the PDF format that can be
shared with regular people and has the same qualities (widespread, wysiwyg,
not editable, etc.) ?

~~~
clarry
Some of the qualities you described are not there in PDF so I'll just name a
reasonable alternative.

HTML.

~~~
Sanddancer
HTML is not WYSIWYG, and it's a pain in the butt to share an html document
with specialty fonts, graphics, precise print layouts, etc in it.

------
readme
Oh crap.

I was relying on that software to play the embedded media in PDF files issued
by my school.

Anyone have a mirror, because I recently wiped my computer...

------
Nux
Good riddance! I stopped using it many years ago. The default PDF reader
provided by the distro is good enough for my needs.

------
fest
zathura is lightweight PDF reader with vim-like keybindings and
vimperator/vimium style navigation.

------
ZenoArrow
Does the current Windows version work using Wine?

------
farresito
The people that use Linux are generally OSS enthusiasts who are not going to
be willing to install a privative software. They problably didn't have that
many users, and was not worth maintaining it.

