>> Are you insane? The excrutiatingly slow and bloated Microsoft Word
>> screams compared to Acrobat. I get so antsy waiting for Acrobat to update
>> a fricken PDF page on the screen that my head wants to explode.
>>
>> Unless you have the latest and greatest 500Mhz PII wonder machine, Acrobat
>> is a farce.
>Not to mention that the Acrobat user interface _SUCKS_!
There are several alternatives to Acrobat. I'm quite familiar with
them because there are no Acrobat binaries for any of the architectures
that I commonly use.
1. Any Ghostscript release from the past few years does PDF quite nicely.
You have a choice of a command line interface (very useful for doing
batch conversions from PDF to something more usable) or a point-and-drool
shell ("GhostView", aka "gv"). Ghostscript is available for many platforms,
it is independent of any specific windowing system, and it is quite usable
on platforms which lack graphic displays at all. For details, see
http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/
2. XPDF, which only does PDF (unlike Ghostscript which does postscript
as well) and only can display on X-windows screens, is also available.
See
http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/
Personally, I think Postscript is a better "high-level" approach to
describing page layout than PDF is, but I also understand the commercial
reasons that force Adobe to push PDF instead.
I've been having a blast lately doing my own printed circuit board layout
in Postscript, incidentally :-). Bezier splines, here we come!
--
Tim Shoppa Email: shoppa_at_trailing-edge.com
Trailing Edge Technology WWW: http://www.trailing-edge.com/
7328 Bradley Blvd Voice: 301-767-5917
Bethesda, MD, USA 20817 Fax: 301-767-5927
Received on Mon Apr 05 1999 - 10:33:48 BST