Flash player no longer supported, what happens to media9 and Skim?

[Jim Diamond]

On Sat, Aug  1, 2020 at 15:45 (-0700), Paulo Ney de Souza wrote:



> They do not have any experience making software for Unix and the
> versions they put out for Linux, Solaris, AIX, ...  were all lacking
> pretty seriously... it was never a contender for anything useful.

> OpenSource and other vendors did a much better job with readers for
> Linux and Adobe did not want to be compared to any of them.

I can't agree.  I have found no Linux PDF viewer which renders fonts
and thin lines anywhere near as well as Acroread.  (Well, maybe not
completely true... the PDF renderer in Opera at least knows how to do
sub-pixel rendering, unlike any stand-alone PDF viewers I've tried.)

I've also found that the stand-alone viewers I've tried on Linux don't
do a good job of rendering white fonts on coloured backgrounds.  For
example, I use white text on a dark blue background for data projector
slides, and I put the page number in a fairly small font (12 pt?), and
that is fairly illegible in a number of PDF viewers I've tried, even
though in Acroread it is nice and crisp.  I don't know how much of
this is due to SPR and how much is due to other algorithms.

The other benefit of Acroread is that it can read oms PDF docs that
none of the open-source readers I've tried can handle.  And sometimes
I have no real choice about using those documents.  (Government forms;
I've tried arguing with people in the government, and I may as well go
down to the ocean and try to keep the tide from coming in.)

I am not an Adobe fan, but credit where credit is due.  Even if it is
only a tiny amount of credit.


Perhaps your experience is different, or you have found better PDF
viewers than I have.  If you have a recommendation, I'd be happy to
hear it, because having to mess around to get a 32-bit executable
(Acroread 9.5.5) to run on a 64-bit only system is a nuisance.

Cheers.

                                Jim