[LINK] Avoiding evil empires (Adobe PDF Reader etc.) & falling into the hands of smaller but perhaps no less evil operators

[David Lochrin]

On Tuesday 21 September 2010 23:50, Robin Whittle wrote:
> I get sick of all the security vulnerabilities in Adobe Reader and the
> consequent need for updates (Adobe Flash too.) and tried using an
> alternative: Nuance PDF Reader 6.0, on my Windows XP
> machine:

I've installed the Windows binary version of the 'evince' document viewer on Windows-7 systems for much the same reasons, and it's pretty good, not as good as KPDF when displaying PDF documents but still quite good - see http://live.gnome.org/Evince.  (The current version is two minor versions later.)  It's open-source too, so one can download the source code to check what it's doing.

It's a "Gnome" OSS application, and according to the website:
"Built-in Support
    *  PDF using the Poppler backend
    *  Postscript using the libspectre backend
    *  Multi-Page TIFF
    *  DVI
    *  DjVu using the DjVuLibre backend"

I'm pretty sure I've read that Foxit has some unpleasant "phone-home" habits, but I can't find the reference quickly so I may be mistaken.

David