acroread vs evince & updates

[aspergerian]

I do medical research, which necessitates the reading of many articles published as pdfs. I often copy a sentence or several and have found that acroread (aka adobe reader) is more functional with regard to detecting text within columns.

Today's WaPost has an article announcing (yet another) adobe reader security patch - for 29 problems. The new adobe is 9.1.3 and is available for MS, MAC, and UNIX.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2009/10/adobe_plugs_critical_reader_ac.html?hpid=sec-tech

Adobe offers an "other versions" url, wherein deb version can be selected.
http://get.adobe.com/reader/otherversions/

I just did that, the install worked well, and now my Hardy Heron netbook is running acroread 9.1.2 - ie, one of the problem versions which 9.1.3 is to have fixed.

I'm not sure why I'm posting this lamentation - perhaps I wonder if the Ubuntu process can help Adobe do better with its updates for Linux.

[Dragonbite]

There is also Okular which is a KDE 4 developed reader. It looks as if it handles selecting text and such better than I've noticed with Evince.

I use PDFs a lot at work (legal documents, etc.) and begun using PDFs more and more at home too such as printing online order confirmations to PDF instead of actually printing them, scanning important files to PDF and burn on a disk for storage, etc.

I wish Adobe would release Acrobat (not just reader) for Linux. I haven't tried it in Wine yet, so I don't know how good that is.

Unfortunately this is not uncommon, for Adobe or any vendor to produce something for their target platform (Windows) first, and then come out eventually with one for other platforms. Apple has been the victim of this for years though now it seems to be Linux's albatross now.

[siimo]

there is also ePDFView

[garvinrick4]

Acroread is out of there for 9.10 Karmic. Try the default from Ubuntu and see what
you think. I have no idea why acroread is not an option in 9.10 would be good to look
into but there default sure seems nice. But I do not read medical documents either but
everything is worth a look. I think it is called Document Viewer. Even gets 5 stars as I
now looked at it.

[UbuWu]

Evince is horrible with multi-column text. It displays everything fine, but when you try to select/copy text from one or more columns, all text gets messed up. I also use it a lot for medical articles, but this is a big annoyance.

[UbuWu]

This is the evince bug btw: https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/33288

There is a patch in the upstream bug report, but progress seems really slow on this.