For obvious reasons, I take an interest in the state of PDF reader
software, though not necessarily as _much_ interest as I wish I had time for.

I went ahead and download Adobe Reader 7, and in many ways I'm impressed
with it ... it's a vast improvement over the lumbering behemoth that was
Reader 6; they seem to have gone out of their way to address regular
complaints about loading-speed, in particular. I'm not too fond of any
software that sticks little executables in my startup routine, though, so I
disabled the "turbo load" thingy ... and it still loads respectably fast.
The rendering and smoothing of different kinds of images (both vector and
raster, including the funky layered-raster method I developed to keep
Caravel both (A) relatively small and yet (B) packed with 600dpi
cartography) is excellent. So, a tentative thumbs-up for Adobe Reader 7.
I'm concerned, though, that Adobe worked some black-magic hoodoo to achieve
the sparkle, since it chokes a bit on some other documents, including,
sadly, page 2 of the Uresia Navigation Maps. On my desktop system, which is
pretty spiff and current, that page is visibly slow in Reader 7, and on my
laptop, which is elderly and wheezing, the program all but locks up the
machine. Seems a lot of fuss over a bunch of hexes -- hexes that don't at
all confuse Reader 4, for example (still my favorite version of the Adobe
program overall, and of course still fully supported in all Cumberland titles).

I've also been test-driving the Foxit PDF Reader:
http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php

Foxit is one of several freeware alternative readers floating around there
... and, true to its claims, it's free and it's fast (and compare the
download size to Reader 7, which isn't any faster or any freer). Foxit has
already become my standard preferred reader on that elderly laptop: it's
very friendly to system resources. It is _very_ light on features, which is
a good thing 95% of the time. The only feature it lacks that I sorely miss
is some equivalent of the "magnifying glass" zoom method where I can draw a
box around the part of a page I want to zoom specifically to. By not having
it I instantly become aware of how habitually I used it. Also, it's
incapable of dealing with some kinds of multiple-PDF-document linkage (like
the Activision Infocom PDF docco uses), but that's a very minor oversight
that most people will probably never notice.

So, overall my pick for Very Best Reader still goes to good old Adobe
Acrobat Reader version 4.x, despite the lack of things like vector
smoothing (didn't show up 'til version 5, but I don't screen-read anyway so
I don't much care how the vectors look on-screen as long as they print
nicely), with Foxit coming in a very close 2nd place (it'll vault into the
winner's circle as soon as I get my magnifying-glass zoom) and Adobe Reader
7 impressing me much more than 5 and 6 managed to.

Let me know your experiences, if you've got a mind to share 'em ... Both
with Cumberland PDFs (so I can work on improving them) and with PDFs in
general. In particular, I'm interested in hearing glowy-happy-tales of
other good third-party programs like Foxit ... What programs do the job
right for you?



|| S. John Ross
|| Husband · Cook · Writer
|| In That Order
|| http://www.io.com/~sjohn