Acrobat beats KPDF to my desktop
I’ve been spending some time lately trying to find the best PDF reader around. KPDF won hands down. Please, don’t even talk to me about Evince, gPDF, xPDF et al. They all have a way to go.
And then one day I realised that the copy of Acrobat Reader I had around was an older static version, and that apt-get was offering me an alternate version (via Marillat, bless his heart). I deleted the old copy, installed the new one (8.0) and low and behold, it was a beauty.
It surpassed KPDF, not by much, mind you, but just by enough to count. It loads faster, it renders pages and thumbnails a bit faster, a bit better, and the fonts are a bit more readable. (Yes, I run the latest KPDF that Debian unstable has to offer.)
The only thing that annoyed me to no end was the “Beyond Acrobat Reader” popup screen, which insisted on appearing every time I started Acrobat. Clicking on the “do not show at startup” checkbox did nothing. Clicking on the big button did nothing. I checked that I had the JavaScript plugins installed. I made sure it could find libgtkmozembed.so. I dug through the preferences. I tried chmod’ing the popup files away (no dice, it would just show an empty popup.)
Somewhere between debugging the DHTML for the popup and strace’ing the bastard I realised I was taking the wrong approach. It then took me 30 seconds to write a Devil’s Pie script that would close the popup as soon as it detected it. End of annoyance:
(if
(and
(is (window_name) "Beyond Adobe Reader")
(is (window_class) "Acroread")
(is (application_name) "acroread")
)
(close)
)So, Acrobat is here to stay. KPDF still has a chance to catch up, however. All it has to do is cache the thumbnails between sessions, so I won’t have to watch it render them on the fly each time I re-open a PDF. Then again, Acrobat may beat it to the punch again, if the devs don’t hurry.