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Adam Betts · May 27, 2003, 10:32 PM

Originally posted by mattmarshall:
when will adobe learn to stop using my Documents folder? anything that does will go where it belongs, in the trash.

Agreed. Lack of attention to details bug me the most.

asxless · May 28, 2003, 01:10 AM

So what happened to the option to display undocked Toolbars in a vertical 1 or 2 column format?

Has it completely escaped the Adobe GUI designer's attention that...
a) nearly all computer displays are wider than they are tall and
b) many (perhaps most) pdf documents are taller than they are wide?

So lets put the "toolbar well" at the top where it wastes the most screen real estate AND make the undocked toolbars horizontal only so they can interfere with the document the most. DUH

Oh and even though the user has already displayed the Navigation toolbar lets repeat it at the bottom of EVERY window using large icons. The user only needs a tiny peep hole to view the document; that's why we gave them that little hand to drag the contents around. Besides, if the user wants to see more of the document at the same time, they can buy a bigger screen or print it out :-/

And while we are at it, lets make the default window size hog the full width of the screen even though the user says they only want a display that requires 1/2 the width.

The good news it that Adobe reader is free. The bad news is that this means Adobe has little or no incentive to make it work well.

-- asxless

Don Pickett · May 28, 2003, 01:44 AM

70 megs? Do Adobe programmers get bonuses for bloat?

voodoo · May 28, 2003, 02:02 AM

Originally posted by Don Pickett:
70 megs? Do Adobe programmers get bonuses for bloat?

Ask JLL to excuse Adobe acrobat reader. He actually tried to excuse the size of acrobat reader to me once. bleh

JLL · May 28, 2003, 03:27 AM

Originally posted by voodoo:
Ask JLL to excuse Adobe acrobat reader. He actually tried to excuse the size of acrobat reader to me once. bleh

Jerk! Play with your Preview that doesn't support 10% of the features in a PDF.

niconono · May 28, 2003, 03:36 AM

Doesn't work on my ibook 10.2.6. Says that cannot install correcly. Same app on FW drive on another computer runs fine. The console says :
Acrobat SelfHealing Error: shGetPathsNoSystemFSRef in line 1837 of file SelfHealer.cpp.

Don Pickett · May 28, 2003, 03:38 AM

Originally posted by JLL:
Jerk! Play with your Preview that doesn't support 10% of the features in a PDF.

As someone who used to make PDFs professionally I'll say it: Adobe software has been on a downward spiral of suck for the last few years. Photoshop gets bigger and slower, and I think the last problem free update to Illustrator was verson 5! I still have the entire Classic Acrobat 5.0 package on my system if I need to make a PDF.

JLL · May 28, 2003, 03:50 AM

Originally posted by asxless:
So lets put the "toolbar well" at the top where it wastes the most screen real estate AND make the undocked toolbars horizontal only so they can interfere with the document the most. DUH

What I find funny is that there are four different ways to close the navigator:

Click on active tab

Click on the X

Click on the blue thingie on the slider

Click on the slider icon at the bottom

biscuit · May 28, 2003, 05:56 AM

Well, I think I like it. Not too keen on the big icons (a bit distracting) and the ads are a joke. I can also see everyone else's points on GUI weirdness and lack of attention to detail.

But the thing that does it for me is the speed, much better than version 5. I mean, you guys talking about Preview must be on Dual 1.42s or something, cos on my poor little iBook 600 Preview 2 is sloooooooooow. Far to slow to be usable. And Preview does funny things with font smoothing; text is more blurry in the centre of the document. I've noticed this with some line images too.

Let's hope Preview 3 becomes the PDF reader we all want. The big question for me is, how come it's so hard to make a good PDF viewer when the whole graphics layer is based on PDF??

biscuit

JLL · May 28, 2003, 07:22 AM

Originally posted by biscuit:
The big question for me is, how come it's so hard to make a good PDF viewer when the whole graphics layer is based on PDF??

There is a lot more to PDFs than viewing.

biscuit · May 28, 2003, 09:17 AM

Originally posted by JLL:
There is a lot more to PDFs than viewing.

Granted, but how come Preview is so slow? It's just a viewer at the end of the day.

Myself, I know nothing about programming. But there must be budding shareware authors out there wanting to make something better than Adobe Reader. Is there a reason why this would be hard? Wouldn't the PDF drawing bit be handled by the OS? Then we can have a few simple, streamlined features for reading/printing/sending PDFs.

I'm guessing I've got this all wrong...

biscuit

manfreds · May 28, 2003, 09:26 AM

For just viewing you can use my PDF Browser Plugin.

Adam Betts · May 28, 2003, 11:22 AM

Originally posted by manfreds:
For just viewing you can use my PDF Browser Plugin.

Is there any way you can hack in Safari (maybe with Application Enchancer) and put in PDF Browser Plugin's awesome scroll engine? I'd love Safari to scroll the same way PDF Browser Plugin does... It's so smooth and beautiful

MindFad · May 28, 2003, 11:39 AM

Originally posted by manfreds:
For just viewing you can use my PDF Browser Plugin.

That's friggin' awesome. Thanks!

bewebste · May 28, 2003, 12:09 PM

Originally posted by JLL:
What I find funny is that there are four different ways to close the navigator:

Click on active tab

Click on the X

Click on the blue thingie on the slider

Click on the slider icon at the bottom

You missed one: click on the toolbar hide/show button in the upper right hand corner of the window.

manfreds · May 28, 2003, 12:17 PM

Originally posted by Adam Betts:
Is there any way you can hack in Safari (maybe with Application Enchancer) and put in PDF Browser Plugin's awesome scroll engine? I'd love Safari to scroll the same way PDF Browser Plugin does... It's so smooth and beautiful

You can't scroll web pages like that. With possibly a fixed background image and other stuff at fixed positions you might need to redraw almost everything, and I think then Macs are not fast enough to scroll smoothly.

asxless · May 28, 2003, 12:34 PM

And then there are the TWO different toolbars named "Zoom". BTW you display the second "Zoom" by selecting the drop down menu on the first "Zoom" toolbar. Once you open the 2nd one, you can turn the first one on and off via the View>Toolbars>Zoom menu selection and the 2nd Zoom remains visible. At least the second Zoom toolbar is smaller

-- asxless

jubbly · May 28, 2003, 01:29 PM

Originally posted by manfreds:
For just viewing you can use my PDF Browser Plugin.

that's an awesome plug-in, nice work.

voodoo · May 28, 2003, 02:14 PM

Originally posted by JLL:
Jerk! Play with your Preview that doesn't support 10% of the features in a PDF.

I don't play with tools, I use them for something constructive.

Name calling is so mature too. You *did* try and excuse the size of Acrobat to me once.

And excuse it again you will.

BuonRotto · May 28, 2003, 02:17 PM

Originally posted by clarkgoble:
I'm not sure I buy the "looks like XP" take on the icons. Yeah I don't know that I like them that much. But they don't quite have the pastel feel of say Word OSX. Further I don't think they are *that* different in tone from say the Finder's icons.

What makes this and other Adobe apps feel like you're working in WinXP is that they use WinXP UI elements. Acrobat eschews any Aqua elements. It uses a sidebar and button bars (those are not toolbars ala OS X) exactly like the ones that are standard Windows elements as per MS UI guidelines. You might as well be using XP when you use an Abode app, espcially this one.

As far as the icons them selves, the save icon floppy is a terrible anachronism but it's the standard Windows "save" icon. The light from the top left is also in conflict with the lighting scheme in Aqua if you want to get picky about it.

JLL · May 28, 2003, 02:54 PM

Originally posted by bewebste:
You missed one: click on the toolbar hide/show button in the upper right hand corner of the window.

Originally posted by asxless:
And then there are the TWO different toolbars named "Zoom". BTW you display the second "Zoom" by selecting the drop down menu on the first "Zoom" toolbar. Once you open the 2nd one, you can turn the first one on and off via the View>Toolbars>Zoom menu selection and the 2nd Zoom remains visible. At least the second Zoom toolbar is smaller.

I'm embarresed that I know one of the programmers behind the damn thing (he didn't work on the interface though).

JLL · May 28, 2003, 02:55 PM

Originally posted by voodoo:
You *did* try and excuse the size of Acrobat to me once.

And excuse it again you will.

Whatever

kovacs · May 28, 2003, 03:32 PM

I just noticed that you can decrease the launch time ( from 12 to 8 sec. on an iMac 500 that's 40% and I only disabled a few of them ) by disabling some plug-ins ( get info in finder ), I disabled Comments, eBook, Save as RTF and Send Mail and that saved me 4 seconds, I did the test a few times and always got the same results...

So which plug-ins can we disable ? I'm sure most of them are not needed for viewing and printing simple PDF's....

malvolio · May 28, 2003, 05:37 PM

Okay, I do like it better than Reader 5. Has very good scrolling.
And it has one really cool feature I just discovered. I was reading a chapter in my PDF version of Steven Hawking's A Short History of Time. Finished the chapter, closed the doc, and Reader asked me if I would like to open to the same page next time.

biscuit · May 29, 2003, 09:26 AM

Ah, yes. The PDF plug-in is what I'm talking about in a way. I used it once before and didn't like it. It's better now though. I guess I'm going to have to change my habits a little...

Thanks for the tip.

biscuit

bousozoku · May 29, 2003, 10:56 AM

After reading so many complaints here, I downloaded the new version of Reader. Other than the ads, there's not a thing wrong with it and more right with it that version 5.1.

Apparently, you don't like creative colour in the icons or the fact that it has icons attached to a toolbar that isn't huge. Preview has the big toolbar and it wastes more space that Adobe's little toolbars and the icons are far bigger than need be.

The type is crisp and embedded photos seem nicer as well. I'll be happy to see a new version of Acrobat--hopefully, this works much better too. Free capabilities aside, there's not much to Mac OS X's ability to make .pdf files in contrast to what Acrobat can do with them.

If you don't like Acrobat, embrace Microsoft's XDocs.

Adam Betts · May 29, 2003, 11:06 AM

Originally posted by bousozoku:
After reading so many complaints here, I downloaded the new version of Reader. Other than the ads, there's not a thing wrong with it and more right with it that version 5.1.

Apparently, you don't like creative colour in the icons or the fact that it has icons attached to a toolbar that isn't huge. Preview has the big toolbar and it wastes more space that Adobe's little toolbars and the icons are far bigger than need be.

The type is crisp and embedded photos seem nicer as well. I'll be happy to see a new version of Acrobat--hopefully, this works much better too. Free capabilities aside, there's not much to Mac OS X's ability to make .pdf files in contrast to what Acrobat can do with them.

If you don't like Acrobat, embrace Microsoft's XDocs.

Do me a favor? STFU. We doesn't need to listen to someone who is ignorant and did not read all of the posts carefully.

BuonRotto · May 29, 2003, 11:11 AM

BTW, you can make a much smaller toolbar in Preview than the one that's there by default. You can make the icons small, make it text only or lse the text and leave only icons (large or small). Look under Preview's View menu to customize the toolbar.

OptimusG4 · May 29, 2003, 11:16 AM

Originally posted by bousozoku:
After reading so many complaints here, I downloaded the new version of Reader. Other than the ads, there's not a thing wrong with it and more right with it that version 5.1.

Apparently, you don't like creative colour in the icons or the fact that it has icons attached to a toolbar that isn't huge. Preview has the big toolbar and it wastes more space that Adobe's little toolbars and the icons are far bigger than need be.

The type is crisp and embedded photos seem nicer as well. I'll be happy to see a new version of Acrobat--hopefully, this works much better too. Free capabilities aside, there's not much to Mac OS X's ability to make .pdf files in contrast to what Acrobat can do with them.

If you don't like Acrobat, embrace Microsoft's XDocs.

Let's see...you can change the toolbar by control-clicking on it in Preview and OMG! You can choose between small icons, text only, icons only, or icons and text! Amazing what happens when you try things out! So next time you want to prove something, do your research.

edit: someone beat me to it, but hey, goes to show that others arent afraid to play with options before opening our mouths.

bousozoku · May 29, 2003, 01:31 PM

Originally posted by Adam Betts:
Do me a favor? STFU. We doesn't need to listen to someone who is ignorant and did not read all of the posts carefully.

Yes, you certainly overwhelmed me with your intelligent use of English. Perhaps, you should read your own posts more carefully.

As far as the Preview toolbar goes, I tried this a long time ago and forgot about it. Thanks to those reminding me. It's somewhat better.

Adam Betts · May 29, 2003, 03:48 PM

Originally posted by bousozoku:
Yes, you certainly overwhelmed me with your intelligent use of English. Perhaps, you should read your own posts more carefully.

When people attack on someone else's English, it show that they can't think of better insults to use

cpac · May 29, 2003, 04:42 PM

Preview is also much faster if you don't have page previews in the drawer (i.e. if you tweak preferences to just have image/page names visible).

That said, nothing out there is really ideal for working with .pdfs I generally prefer Preview to Acrobat because it's lighter weight, etc. but what I would hope we'll get with Preview 3 (and or some third party solution) is:

1) faster scrolling/previewing (w/ more viewing layout options?)
2) ability to select text
3) ability not to truely edit, but to append - i.e. if I've got a .pdf that's a textbook chapter, I can highlight it (as I can with the full version of Acrobat).
4) ability to add bookmarks
5) ability to use hyperlinks etc.

.pdfs are a nice thing, but having to shell out a huge amount for the full version of acrobat just to do a couple of minor additions is ridiculous for those of us that aren't creating .pdfs for a living. and what's with the huge upgrade cost from v.5???)

petergallagher · May 29, 2003, 05:59 PM

Originally posted by cpac:
That said, nothing out there is really ideal for working with .pdfs I generally prefer Preview to Acrobat because it's lighter weight, etc.

Try MetaObject's PostView 1.1 -- at www.metaobject.com.

Its Cocoa, lightweight, fast, works with PS files as well as PDFs, has an OK search facility that is much faster than Acrobat's search, will rotate, display dual pages etc. etc.

Still needs work in my opinion on some interface aspects (e.g. it won't copy images as Acrobat Reader will) but MetaObject say they're working on it.

tooki · May 29, 2003, 08:18 PM

Am I the only one who thinks the person who designed the install method (Adobe Download Manager, which does nothing but download a .dmg file, which then self-mounts, copies the Adobe Reader 6 folder to the desktop, and then deletes itself) needs to be drawn and quartered?

tooki

york28 · May 29, 2003, 09:00 PM

Hmm..I was undet the impression that Adobe Download manager was only for Windows. At least that's what the online system requirements say, unless I missed a page.

But I clicked the box to NOT use it anyway when downloading, I don't really like that sort of installer much.

I don't really like the automatic .dmg thing either tho, but Apple started it with Safari.

As for the app itself it performs better on my 500 iBook, so I'm going to let the interface slide. A little XP is better imho than lots of 95, which is what 5 looked like to me.

bousozoku · May 29, 2003, 10:21 PM

Originally posted by Adam Betts:
When people attack on someone else's English, it show that they can't think of better insults to use

It wasn't an insult for you--it was a sarcastic observation.

Besides, if I attacked everyone's use of English, I'd have time for nothing else.

BuonRotto · May 29, 2003, 10:43 PM

Originally posted by tooki:
Am I the only one who thinks the person who designed the install method (Adobe Download Manager, which does nothing but download a .dmg file, which then self-mounts, copies the Adobe Reader 6 folder to the desktop, and then deletes itself) needs to be drawn and quartered?

tooki

Adobe, making your life E(h)A(a)S(r)I(d)E(e)R(r)

Brazuca · May 29, 2003, 11:38 PM

wow, this is dog slow. Do you guys find that updating the prebind helps? Can you post the command (too many variations and i'm not sure the correct one). Thx.

tritonus · Aug 23, 2003, 07:54 AM

I'd rather use Preview, but I'm missing a search function there. Is there any?

Anybody got a solution for the unwanted "eBooks" folder in "Documents"?