PDF not readable with free software [LWN.net]

PDF not readable with free software

Posted Sep 30, 2008 9:32 UTC (Tue) by dps (guest, #5725)
Parent article: openSUSE and the distribution of proprietary software

I am fairly sure I know of a PDF that requires acrobat (reader). The free software I have tried (mostly xpdf derivatives) only dispalays page 1 of the PDF specification (which in is PDF) format. If you want to page pages 2 to 300+ you need acrobat.

I have also experienced one PDF document which xpdf displayed fine but printed a set of black boxes. Using adobe's software worked without any problems. Explanations are welcome on the back of a post card.

Electronic journal articles, which are almost always in PDF format, are particularly prone to problems. I suspect some of them are not valid PDF but acrobat reader somehow copes with the problems, possibly by ignoring the incorrect data.

(Given the choice I prefer a 64 bit version of xpdf to acroread, partly because the former is a lot faster and shares more memory with other programs.)

OT: PDF not readable with free software

Posted Oct 2, 2008 10:27 UTC (Thu) by debacle (subscriber, #7114) [Link]

Could you please post a link to the offending document, so that people could try it and maybe solve the problems? TIA.

PDF not readable with free software

Posted Oct 2, 2008 17:37 UTC (Thu) by pcdavid (guest, #4295) [Link] (1 responses)

If you're talking about this one: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/acrobat/pdfs/PDF32000_2008.pdf, Evince 2.22.2 has absolutely no problem opening it and navigating to any of the 756 pages.

PDF not readable with free software

Posted Oct 16, 2008 15:57 UTC (Thu) by Duncan (guest, #6647) [Link]

Similarly, kpdf/konqueror (kde 3.5.10) display it fine.

Duncan