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

Kim Holburn kim at holburn.net
Sat Sep 25 14:06:09 AEST 2010


You could use Mac Where PDF is builtin both reading and writing or  
linux where you can easily get readers and writers as part of the  
distribution (but you probably didn't want to hear that ;-).

I've heard good things about cutepdf which lets you print to PDF for  
free from any program.  I use evince on linux and it has some nice  
features like remembering where you were when you last opened a  
document.

There's a list of various PDF software including readers here:
http://en.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/List_of_PDF_software
Some of which are open source.


On 2010/Sep/25, at 12:36 PM, David Lochrin wrote:

> 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
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-- 
Kim Holburn
IT Network & Security Consultant
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