% acroread +useFrontEndProgram
By Leslie Polzer on November 28, 2006
PDF's progenitor PostScript is a page description language that was invented in 1982, also by Adobe. It is an interpreted language with postfix (RPN) notation and is thus very flexible. In contrast, PDF is a file format describing the position and nature of text and pictorial content (in raster or vector format), which makes it easier to parse and process. To learn more about the relationship of PostScript and PDF, see Adobe's explanation.
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If you have a choice, I recommend using a combination of Xpdf and KPDF to view PDF files. I'd rather copy and paste a URL leading to a PDF document into Konqueror and use the KPDF browser plugin than wait for the Acrobat Reader plugin to stuff its megabytes into my memory. Of course, you can also just instruct your browser to open PDF files with your favorite viewer, thus removing the dependency on plugins. Okular looks promising for people who don't like the "keep it plain" philosophy of the GNOME project that shows in Evince. Also, check out DjVu if your content is mainly in raster format (this is especially true for scanned documents and photographs).
documented on: 2007-09-05
You still can't read each and every PDF document with xpdf, especially DRM protected files are impossible to view…
You also can't fill out fillable PDFs with anything except acroread
You can fill out pdfs with flpsed. flpsed allows you add text to pdfs.
flpsed - a WYSIWYG pseudo PostScript editor
On another note xpdf is many times faster for small pdfs than acroread. However, if you zoom in on a big pdf (like a map) w/ xpdf it renders the whole thing to X as an image. If that image is bigger than your memory (regardless of the screen size), X swaps out and your machine is reduced to a crawl. Acroread, on the other hand, doesn't do that. It just renders the part of the screen that is visible, which is slower than keeping your image in memory, but much faster than reading swapped contents from disk.
Kludge
*Tags*: cmd:acroread
By default, only one Reader process can be running. If you type acroread <filename> when Reader is already running, the currently running version of Reader becomes active and displays the specified file.
If you prefer that a new version of Reader be launched each time you start Reader, type the following command:
% acroread +useFrontEndProgram
To convert a PDF file by piping it into Reader and then sending the output to a file, type the following:
% cat sample.pdf | acroread -toPostScript > sample.ps
To convert one or more PDF files, such as sample1.pdf and sample2.pdf, into PostScript files and place these PostScript files into the directory <dir>, type the following:
% acroread -toPostScript sample1.pdf sample2.pdf <dir>
If you need to complete fillable forms, you will need to install the acroread-plugins package.
$ apt-cache show acroread-plugins Package: acroread-plugins Priority: optional Section: text Version: 7.0.9-0.2sarge1 Replaces: acroread (<= 7.0-0.0), acroread-plugin Depends: acroread (= 7.0.9-0.2sarge1), acroread-escript Description: Plugins for Adobe Acrobat(R) Reader
This package contains plugins who enable javascript in acroread and thus make acroread able to send to a remote host which pdf files you are reading. See http://lwn.net/Articles/129729/
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/alternate.html ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/acrobatreader/unix/4.x/sunsparc-rs-405.tar.gz
The installation script prompts you to answer questions regarding the installation, such as where you want to place the Reader files. Reasonable default values are provided.
The default location for installation of the Acrobat Reader software is the following directory:
For Solaris : /opt/Acrobat4
For Linux : /usr/local/Acrobat4
Start the installation script:
# ./INSTALL
Enter installation directory for Acrobat 4.0 [/opt/Acrobat4] /usr/shared/Acrobat4
Directory "/usr/shared/Acrobat4" does not exist. Do you want to create it now? [y]
Installing platform independent files … Done
Installing platform dependent files … Done
VERSION: 4.0 PLATFORM: UNIX(R) RELEASED ON: 06/08/99
(5708K)
(5708K)
Follow the detailed instructions in the Instguid.txt file:
./INSTALL
[...] Enter installation directory for Acrobat 4.0 [/usr/local/Acrobat4] [...]
.. cd /usr/local/bin lns /usr/local/Acrobat4/bin/acroread
Acrobat 4 contains an example script that starts Netscape and allows you to view PDF files inline instead of using an Acrobat viewer as a helper application. The example script is located in <installdir>/Browsers.
./netscape
doesn't work!
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier March 30, 2005
There are a few other features that Linux users should be aware of.
A company called Remote Approach is promising to alert PDF publishers as to the "reach and use of their materials." We were curious to find out how Remote Approach was going to make good on its promise, given that PDF has largely been seen as a one-way medium. To find out, we created a test account and uploaded a PDF to be "tagged" by Remote Approach, and then downloaded the modified document to see whether Remote Approach could log our use of the document.
Remote Approach's reporting did not work when we viewed the document with Kpdf, Xpdf and Adobe Reader 5.0.10. It also failed using Apple's "Preview" application on Mac OS X. The document was still viewable with no apparent glitch in other PDF readers, but the reporting function did not work. However, when we opened the file using Adobe Acrobat Reader 7, Remote Approach started logging views from our IP address. After doing a little research, we found that Adobe's Reader was connecting to http://www.remoteapproach.com/remoteapproach/logging.asp each time we opened the document. The information is submitted over port 80 using HTTP, so it is unlikely that a home or office firewall would, in a normal configuration, block the activity, unless the firewall administrator is attempting to block Web browsing.
Apparently, Remote Approach's "tag" to our document included the addition of JavaScript code causing Acrobat to report back to their server; the information reported includes the fact that the document had been read, our IP address, and which viewer it had been read in. (Interestingly, Remote Approach does not seem to recognize the Linux version of Acrobat Reader, as it left the "User Agent" field blank in its reports.)
documented on: 2005.05.10