[arachne] Re: ARA-PDF.APM under FreeDOS 1.0 and Arachne 1.90J1

Arachne at FreeLists---The Arachne Fan Club!

On Sat, 30 Sep 2006, Glenn Gilbreath Jr. wrote:

The only real
solution is to use more recent versions of Windows or maybe Mac.

I'm not using Windows or Mac, yet I manage to read the very latest PDF files. (Guess you forgot about the several hundreds of 'nix distributions)

Frankly, I run across very few pdfs that actually need acroreader 7 (though I do have it installed for such rare occasions), since even xpdf-3.01 can read version 1.6 PDFs (at least xpdf-3.01_3 can read the only 1.6 presently in /tmp:

$ for i in /tmp/*.[Pp][Dd][Ff]; do file $i; done
/tmp/44142.PDF: PDF document, version 1.4
/tmp/91811-1.pdf: PDF document, version 1.3
/tmp/91811.pdf: PDF document, version 1.3
/tmp/Consequences.PDF: PDF document, version 1.4
/tmp/Details2.pdf: PDF document, version 1.6
/tmp/ElCrucerito.pdf: PDF document, version 1.4
/tmp/FeeSchedule_4_9_06.pdf: PDF document, version 1.3
/tmp/M1017_m.pdf: PDF document, version 1.4
/tmp/NyambeneCoffeeEstates.pdf: PDF document, version 1.3
/tmp/PlateGame.pdf: PDF document, version 1.3
/tmp/SherlineLathe.pdf: PDF document, version 1.2
/tmp/doverdownload.pdf: PDF document, version 1.4
/tmp/focus-0001_2001-06a.pdf: PDF document, version 1.3
/tmp/roof_flashing.pdf: PDF document, version 1.2
/tmp/scuba_quick_connect_to_sae_j1926_adapter.pdf: PDF document, version 1.4
/tmp/team3report.pdf: PDF document, version 1.4
/tmp/tires_filling.pdf: PDF document, version 1.4
/tmp/valed.pdf: PDF document, version 1.4
/tmp/vehicle.pdf: PDF document, version 1.3

If my /tmp directory is representative at all of what's "out there" then it would appear that PDF-1.4 is the most common by a fair margin. If you say "1.4 or earlier" then you've got 95% covered.

Foxit
does a decent job of displaying PDFs though, and is much smaller and less
resource hungry than Adobe's Acrobat Reader.

xpdf uses ~9% the RAM that Acroreader7 uses. (Remember, I used to use xpdf on a K5-75 w/8MB RAM.)
Arachne at FreeLists -- Arachne, The Premier GPL Web Browser/Suite for DOS --

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