A guide to using PDFs on GNU/Linux (Linux Journal) [LWN.net]

A guide to using PDFs on GNU/Linux (Linux Journal)

Posted Jun 8, 2007 9:08 UTC (Fri) by ringerc (subscriber, #3071) [Link]

PDF support on Linux is getting good if and only if you only need quite basic PDF features. CMYK support, ICC colour management & embedded profiles, PDF forms, etc are still very limited. In fact, even the Linux version of Adobe Reader lacks ICC colour support which is a great pity.

Recent kpdf versions are starting to get fairly full PDF support, but are still quite limited.

Working in pre-press and print, I find that even the Linux port of Adobe Reader is a bit too limiting, and the OSS alternatives really aren't up to it. For just reading PDF on screen, they do the job great.

A guide to using PDFs on GNU/Linux (Linux Journal)

Posted Jun 8, 2007 11:14 UTC (Fri) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]

So it's better for 90% of the people. But some later Adobe extensions are not supported?

Oh, and Javascript is not supported. I consider this a feature.

A guide to using PDFs on GNU/Linux (Linux Journal)

Posted Jun 8, 2007 20:29 UTC (Fri) by evgeny (guest, #774) [Link]

> Oh, and Javascript is not supported. I consider this a feature.

Like in a browser, disabling JS is good for viewing untrusted input. However, omitting JS entirely means you restrict yourself to increasingly more primitive content. E.g., I like to use animations in my PDF presentations (and it's possible to do with LaTeX!), however, at the moment they are viewable only with Acroread.

A guide to using PDFs on GNU/Linux (Linux Journal)

Posted Jun 15, 2007 22:26 UTC (Fri) by kamil (subscriber, #3802) [Link]

I agree with most of what you say, with the exception of the last sentence.

Sadly, I have yet to see a free PDF viewer that would be even close in quality to acroread when viewing on screen. Essentially, two features are universally missing: sub-pixel anti-aliasing of text and *any* anti-aliasing for lineart.

I just checked how a PDF output of my most recent LaTeX document looks in kpdf. It's pretty sad. I don't think I would dare trying to read more than a few sentences off the screen -- I have only one pair of eyes.

I keep being puzzled by those news stories appearing every few months on how good free PDF viewers now are. Sure, they have improved, but they still have a *very* long way to go. Announcing the problem as "solved", as many seem to do, quite simply does a disservice to the community.

A guide to using PDFs on GNU/Linux (Linux Journal)

Posted Jun 12, 2007 23:04 UTC (Tue) by yarikoptic (subscriber, #36795) [Link]

not true imho. If you are talking about FOSS software then may be. Otherwise there is a huge set of tools for PDF processing under Linux. Just enter your problem (edit pdf, pdf form, etc) in google to realize the truth. I remember myself 6 years ago using adobe illustrator to mangle PDF files.

A guide to using PDFs on GNU/Linux (Linux Journal)

Posted Jun 14, 2007 9:34 UTC (Thu) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link]

Another poster already mentioned several features that are needed for professional PDF usage. (Color management, above all.)

I'd like to add some missing features on the user level:

Please tell me where I can find a PDF viewer for Linux that supports multimedia (movies and sound). I can produce such with pdfTeX, look up the ConTeXt Web site for some interesting examples, but I cannot view them on Linux.

Second, a FAQ on any TeX list is: How do I enable the ability to add comments to a PDF file in a viewer (in particular, Acroread) with any open source tool. We know of no such tool, please tell us about one.

Third, would you please tell us a tool that resembles Adobe Illustrator? Sorry, but pdfedit is not on the same level.

Last, but not least: On Linux, the rendering of truetype fonts in Acroread is better, compared to xpdf or kpdf. I dunno why that is, but I see it on a daily basis. Most of the time it doesn't disturb me and I use xpdf or kpdf for their smaller resource footprint. But everytime when I do real layout work, I switch back to Acroread.

Joachim

A guide to using PDFs on GNU/Linux (Linux Journal)

Posted Jun 8, 2007 12:54 UTC (Fri) by jfj (guest, #37917) [Link]

Yes. That used to be the case. But in the last versions of PDF there are some features which are just too hard to implement on a code base that is not Acrobat. For example, what business do hyperlinks and forms have in the Portable Document Format, which according to the specification is a document format that is device independent and can be rendered on devices like printers, etc?

If PDF becomes the display of the Adobe Apollo runtime, instead of a portable document format, linux will be left behind. For the moment, xpdf (upon which kpdf and poppler are built) is just fine.

A guide to using PDFs on GNU/Linux (Linux Journal)

Posted Jun 14, 2007 9:38 UTC (Thu) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link]

Users that create PDF disagrees with you. In fact, PDF are most often used for online distribution of formatted material. (They are even more important for preprint work, but the amount of people doing this is much lower.)

For instance, the popularity of the LaTeX package hyperref surely shows that your opinion "hyperlinks are not necessary in PDF" is not commonly shared.

Joachim

A guide to using PDFs on GNU/Linux (Linux Journal)

Posted Jun 8, 2007 15:20 UTC (Fri) by sjj (guest, #2020) [Link]

MS Office 2007 can save as PDF (may require a download from Microsoft). And there are a whole lot of PDF printer drivers, including PDFCreator.sourceforge.net.

Not difficult to make, at least for regular document exchange purposes.

A guide to using PDFs on GNU/Linux (Linux Journal)

Posted Jun 9, 2007 9:31 UTC (Sat) by hein.zelle (guest, #33324) [Link]

That is, if you're running ms office 2007. I'm sure it'll be accepted more broadly soon, but for the moment the only windows machine in our office which can produce pdf file is the one of our secretary, who has a proprietary adobe plugin for word.

It's truly amazing to see what gets sent around in unsafe, editable documents (with history inside) in commercial environments. I still need to push our management/commercial people to use pdf's instead of word documents when they send something to a client. These are not small, unknown clients, either, and they also send word documents to us.

Thankfully in some places there is also a positive change: we're in the first project between 4 commercial companies where the acceptable document exchange formats are odf and pdf. I'm hoping this will become a trend.

A guide to using PDFs on GNU/Linux (Linux Journal)

Posted Jun 13, 2007 2:03 UTC (Wed) by rqosa (guest, #24136) [Link]

> the only windows machine in our office which can produce pdf file is the one of our secretary, who has a proprietary adobe plugin for word.

If you have a PostScript printer driver, you can print to file and then convert the PostScript to PDF with Ghostscript (which runs on Windows).

A guide to using PDFs on GNU/Linux (Linux Journal)

Posted Jun 13, 2007 12:57 UTC (Wed) by job (subscriber, #670) [Link]

... or just install pdfcreator as sll said above, which is far simpler to use.

A guide to using PDFs on GNU/Linux (Linux Journal)

Posted Jun 14, 2007 9:44 UTC (Thu) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link]

Missing: color management, multimedia support, better forms support (in fact, PDF 1.6), the ability to create a document that allows to add comments in a viewer (in particular, acroread), better truetype font rendering, linearization of PDF X objects, some PDF edit tool that has the features of Adobe Illustrator (yes, I know about pdfedit).

And that's just the missing stuff on Linux that annoys me most. Hans Hagen (the ConTeXt creator) can talk about the deficiencies of PDF on Linux whole evenings.

PDF support on Linux still has some way to go until it will reach the proficiency of its Windows relatives.

Joachim