An audience of two

Tuesday March 21, 2006

Death to PDF!
According to Jonathan's Blog Customers appreciate choice. Here's proof: in less than a year, developers have requested nearly 4 million Solaris licenses - and 65% of the downloads are running on non-Sun hardware. By non-sun hardware I presume he means X86. After all, not many people have a Tadpole at home. So where the smeg is Acrobat Reader for Solaris X86? If you hunt around the net long enough you can find an old copy of the Version 4. But now it's at Version 7. I've been using the gnone PDF viewer (which is OK in a pinch) or xpdf from blastwave.org (which is better).

But how hard can it be for Adobe to recompile their reader for Solaris X86? Is it really so incredibly badly written that it's not just a trivial recompile? I'm guessing so - I've had this system for 4 months and I'm still waiting. How long does a port take?

The problem is that people are treating PDF as a standard. It's not. It's a proprietary format controlled by a corporation who are neglecting a significant number of users. I'm sick of having to switch to a different system just to open a file that someone has sent to me. Jonathan is quick to complain about sites requiring Microsoft products - well why are Adobe products any better? I'm calling for a company-wide boycott of Adobe and PDF until they commit to supporting Solaris X86 on an equal footing with Sparc and Linux.

Who's with me? Permalink | | | | Comments [5]
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