If you haven't tried Adobe Reader 7 yet...

ElDiabloConCaca

ElDiabloConCaca

U.S.D.A. Prime
...then I highly suggest you do. Even on my old, pokey 500MHz G4, it launches in about 2 - 3 seconds. Rendering, viewing and scrolling are much improved.

I still prefer Preview, but I think Adobe's got this one right -- slow it is not anymore!
 
Adobe on Tuesday released Adobe Reader 7.0, the latest version of its free software for opening PDFs. In addition to an improved search feature, the ability to fill out and submit forms, the ability to save various files attached to PDF documents and other new functions, Adobe Reader 7 allows you to activate special abilities embedded in PDFs with Acrobat 7.0 Professional or Adobe LiveCycle. Those abilities include adding comments with enhanced tools, affixing digital signatures, using custom stamps and locally saving filled-out forms. Reader 7.0 requires Mac OS X v10.2.8 or v10.3, a G3 processor, up to 35MB RAM and up to 125MB free hard drive space.
 
It's about time Adobe makes a browser plugin that works in OS X. To bad it only works in Safari. :mad:
 
Zammy-Sam said:
will it make Adope the default app for .pdf? I still want to keep Preview.
Click to expand...

Well if it wants to take over then just click on a pdf and make Preview the default application.
 
One important feature Adobe's Reader has over Preview is that it can display PDF files in newer versions. From one customer, I usually get a PDF once a week I have to take data out of, and Preview simply doesn't display that data, as if a whole layer's missing. Preview's PDF capability stems from Quartz (Apple's PDF implementation), and AFAIK that's still based on the openly published version 1.2 of the PDF standard. Maybe 1.3, if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure that v1.4 and v1.5 PDFs can have features that Preview simply doesn't handle. At all.
 
I've only played with it for a few minutes, but it definitely way better than before. Everything is indeed faster, from launch to interactivity.

On a scroll test (Preview vs. Reader 7) of a 128 page PDF, Preview edged R7 out by three seconds (Preview finished in 11 seconds). Both felt very fast though.

R7 displayed a fairly complicated PDF (Midship map from Halo 2) in about ten seconds by showing each "layer" or render item one at a time. Preview took almost three times as long and didn't show anything until it was fully ready to display.

Preview did display another smaller, but complicated PDF more quickly and also had slightly snappier interactivity on this particular document.

So, for general PDF viewing, I can no longer rule out Reader, especially since it shows data.

But what about commenting/markup? I thought I read somewhere this was now part of Reader (and not just Acrobat). I could find no tools that allowed me to comment or markup a page. I really think Adobe needs to make that part of the free Reader. I would love to get all my clients using PDF for markup (without the expense).
 
And finally, when submitting a form in xfdf format, fields containing Swedish characters ÅÄÖ are no longer considered empty.
 
I _hope_ this means we'll also get a faster full Acrobat 7. (Waiting for the German version to come out...)
 
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