Acrobat rant

I knew there was a reason I'm an Acrobat luddite. What moron decided the toolbar options most frequently sought in a hurry, rotate page, should be removed from the default toolbars in Acrobat Reader 8? (The corporate PCs just got upgraded from 7 to 8. I haven't tried 9 yet.)

To get the Rotate back: View / Toolbars / More Tools. Scroll down the window to the options for the Page Display Toolbar and turn on Rotate Clockwise and Rotate Anti Counter-Clockwise.

Now, can someone explain to me how Acrobat has bloated so much over the years?

Acrobat versions sizes

And WTF was the deal with version 7.05?!

6 thoughts on “Acrobat rant

  1. Chris Till

    Are you sure you’re not talking about the bloating of Reader, not Acrobat, as the rest of your post is discussing the Reader?

    It’s probably the bundling of crap – Welcome to the Adobe Reader installer, by the way I am also going to dump a sh#tload of Yahoo or Google crap onto your computer as well unless you untick this option right now sucker.

    At least most software no longer includes an entire copy of Internet Explorer in their damn setup files anymore, god that sh#tted me to no end back in the day – Welcome to xyz installer, by the way I am also going to forcibly try installing IE3 onto your computer even though you already have IE4 or IE5.

  2. Chris Till

    On that note there are several solutions I’ve been doing for Adobe Readers slowness and bloatness over recent years…

    On my work SOE I use the Adobe Reader Speedup tool to remove a massive number of the modules we don’t even need/use. This makes Adobe Reader start in literally 10% of the time it normally does.

    On my Mac I don’t even bother with the Adobe Reader anymore – Apple’s Preview utility works brilliantly if not better, is already with the operating system, and displays PDFs instantly instead of waiting for Adobe Reader to (slowly) start itself up.

    I think the problem is memory and hard disk space is so large and cheap these days that most programmers simply do not give a rats. Why else is something even as simple as a viewer needing so much disk space and consuming so many resources? That’s one thing I love about UNIX programmers – like me they painfully rewrite and tweak their code over and over and over again, and years later are still doing so every time they touch their code rather than simply piling new stuff straight on top.

  3. daniel Post author

    Yeah, Reader in particular, not the greater Acrobat.

    I have tried the odd Reader alternative, but it’s like a lot of things — for ease of compatibility, it seems easiest to go with the Name Brand ™.

  4. Philip

    I too was amazed at how easy PDFs became when I got a Mac. Preview not only opens them and browses faster through them (on my 1.33 GHz Mac mini) than Adobe Reader (on my Pentium 4 HT at work), but it allows me to grab pages from PDF files, rotate them, re-order them and paste them into other PDF files. It’s brilliant.

  5. Sam

    Something happened between 6 and 7 to cause a massive code bloat. 7.05 was released, then they probably started using that NOSSO compression thingy you see everytime you install Reader now.

    The only viable alternative on Windows is Foxit Reader, but it still doesn’t render PDFs to the exact specs that Reader does. The difference is visible, but generally not an issue. Smaller, much faster, no printing bugs so far, and more responsive.

  6. martin eisenstadt

    i like the fact that acrobat can ‘read’ documents to you. it aids multitasking.

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