Adobe’s way
Have you ever wondered what you need to read a PDF file on Windows ? I know you’re happy on your Linux box doing everything with a few steps, installing applications from your super large repos .. but here’s what i did tonight to read a simple pdf file, costing me 20 minutes and pain.
I knew that the pdf reader thing is “Adobe Reader”, so googled “adobe reader download” which led me to adobe’s site. After clicking “download” button, web site started to install a Firefox plugin (!) “the adobe downloader !”. After installing and restarting firefox, download started on a fancy window, it was a 40MB file which after the download was extracted ! and windows started to configure! the reader after extract, all in the slowest way you could imagine .. And for what ? For reading a N kb file, or picture, or something.
I wouldn’t dare to install this stupid app if only the open source alternatives (on windows of course) had some sense of esthetics, that fonts wouldn’t look like lines we drew in elementary school .. I dont know whats the problem of all these developers, are you trying to put an alternative or have lots of time and decided to write a pdf reader in it ?
There are alternatives out there, here is one of them: http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/reader/
I really liked Foxit Reader when it was smaller, did not bother me with things like pdf library (a directory of my pdf files). Yet, this is far better than Adobe’s Acrobat Reader.
And to “what is wrong with these developers”: For them, development is the process of making things more complicated and thus less usable. That’s all. That is the reason we have a 50MB download to read a file, 300MB download just to run an application. Plain stupid, I know, but nobody should claim homo * (especially this last one, us) is an intelligent life form.
Thanks for your suggestion, i have adobe and its license etc. they distribute it with hardware cd’s etc.
It’de be better to have a foss alternative actually but i’ll give foxit a try next time i boot to windows (dont know when really :P)