RobiNZ CAD Blog

Foxit PDF Reader 2.3 not foxed by PDF drawings with hatch

Foxit’s remarkable little free PDF reader was always good for documents – better than Adobe’s I reckon – but sometimes choked on drawing PDFs with dense hatch patterns. This was seen as an endless draw/re-draw refresh loop as it struggled to render the line-work.

Since we use DWF for drawings it really didn’t concern me but I’ve found it seems to be fixed in the latest 2.3 update. I’ve tried PDFs up to 40–50mb with very dense hatch patterns and images and they render fine.

Foxit is a free PDF Reader that is a tiny download (2.55mb), loads really fast, doesn’t run updaters that crash or nag me to download unrelated junk software I don’t want. It just views & prints PDFs quickly, which is all I need. 

http://www.foxitsoftware.com/

Tags: foxit

Giving up with Adobe Reader...

This post on Beth’s blog reminded me why a few weeks ago I removed Adobe Acrobat . My machine slowed down then appeared to almost freeze, yet all the app’s I was using were working fine. It turned out that Adobe Updater, installed by Acrobat Acrobat, had crashed in the background.

I restarted and ran it to see if Reader did need updating. The only results were recommendations to download other applications I didn’t want. Add that hassle to a bloated reader that I only use to read PDF documents and it was time to try an alternative.

Sometime ago a commenter here recommended an alternative so now I use Foxit Reader. It’s a free PDF Reader that loads really fast, appears to render documents just fine, doesn’t run updaters that crash or nag me to download junk I don’t want. Hardest part of the change was learning to look for a new icon for PDF files.

Beth's CAD Blog: Adobe Security Warning
You may have received an email about this. If you haven't, you might want to check your version of Adobe Acrobat Reader.
Be warned though that you should be careful when downloading this. Adobe is one of several software vendors that is including Google or Yahoo Toolbars with downloads. Most people fly through dialog boxes clicking "Next" and not paying enough of attention…

Scoble's video demo of Adobe Acrobat 8

Robert Scoble has exclusive Adobe Acrobat 8 videos on-line. He interviews Rick Brown, Adobe’s director of product management for its knowledge worker business unit, about the future of Adobe Acrobat and the key features of Acrobat 8 then gets a quick demo.

Breaking News: Adobe announces Acrobat 8 (exclusive videos) « Scobleizer - Tech Geek Blogger
Adobe just released Acrobat 8 and last week I got an exclusive look at it through my camera lens when Rick Brown, Director of Product Management of the Knowledge Worker business unit gave me a demo…

This line from Roberts own post was interesting:

Is this important? Well, Adobe makes quite a bit of profit off of the Acrobat line and Microsoft is gunning for that profit big time.

I’d say Microsoft aren’t the only ones…

The movies are Quicktime .mov format* & quite large 135mb for the demo, 96mb for the interview.
*Pity as I think freebie Quicktime viewer is awful & I ain't paying for pro.

Tags: PDF, Adobe, Acrobat+8

PDF death match?

This is an old article (July 2005) which, for some reason, just showed up in my “Most Viewed Articles” RSS feed from Architecture Magazine . It’s one of those silly “we’re better than you, no you’re not…” articles but still worth a read if you haven’t seen it.

PDF death match - architecturemag.com

For CAD I prefer DWF and we use it on the intra-net but still sometimes need PDF. Sometimes there is someone in the project who can’t/won’t view DWF. In a corporate world of locked down managed users a viewer is more than a download/install away even if it’s free.

Although DWF claim to be approaching 10 million viewer downloads in the article they mention 500 million “PDF Readers”. In both cases how many of those are active, and for PDF how many are viewing CAD documents, is probably impossible to estimate.

The other obstacle for DWF is perception and education. For many “PDF” has become a generic term for ”sharable document”;

Last week I got an email from a Project Manager asking “why this PDF plan is all blocky and unreadable when zoomed really close. Is there something wrong with my settings?”. I made a DWF of the same file with much higher resolution and nearly 1/2 the file size; problem solved. They were issued a PDF, although had DWF Viewer, because they specifically requested “a PDF plan”…

So, will PDF use for CAD die?

I think it unlikely although it can happen, remember once…

“Portable Music Player = Walkman”…

3D Dwf on its way!

For me the PDF/DWF battle is over as we have adopted DWF as the CAD sharing format for our Intranet. However the inclusion of 3d will be a great advance for the format. Will be interesting to watch this progress. WorldCAD Access: DWF Goes 3D!