Windows Modern Reader: it's got to be better than Acrobat

Windows 8 is set to include its own native PDF reader, signalling the end of forced Adobe Reader integration.

A thousand weary PDF perusers are no doubt crying tears of happiness at the mere thought of never again having to update their PDF reader eighty-four times a day.

Hopefully the proprietary reader will also see an end to the almost-mandatory desktop shortcut that Adobe Reader drops on your desktop every time you update - but then again, this is Microsoft so we wouldn't bet on it.

Modernity

The new Microsoft PDF reader is known as 'Modern Reader', and uses the new AppX application package type, which is very similar to that of Windows Phone 7 and is likely to be used in Windows Phone 8 software too.

This should make emailing and opening PDF files on your phone and computer a much smoother experience, we'd hope, and could make developing cross-device applications much easier for devs.

The screenshots of the Modern Reader UI are pretty standard, featuring a very Windows Phone 7-esque look; it renders PDFs in full fidelity, offers zoom, allows for side-by-side page viewing and has a bookmark side-bar for skipping through chapters.

Read more: http://www.techradar.com/news/software/ ... z1IgoxxIRg

Posting this here cos I know we've got a bunch of people who use PDFs for various things and probably just as many people who hate Adobe

Personally I've usually found PDFs to be crap in general - slow, sometimes 'buggy', crap controls etc, even in Foxit never mind Adobe's bloatware...

PDF is the de-facto standard of portable document formats, and generally I think it's a reasonable format. Certainly beats Word and RTF which are far from "portable".

Adobe on the other hand...

I think possibly the biggest problem is that they've tried to make it more than anyone actually wants. I just want faithfully rendered fonts and images so that you see my document as I intended it to be seen; I don't even need video let alone all those security holes they somehow manage to fit in there. I'm sure there was an un-bloated version many years ago which they should have just declared "final release".

Without wishing to make this into a Windows and Mac thang, the real surprise is what took Microsoft so long to come up with their own bundled PDF viewer.

I haven't had to install the god-awful Adobe Reader bloatware on my home Macs since the early days of OS X about 10 years ago - Apple's built-in Preview app does everything I could ask of, and you can easily create PDFs from any application that can print - no additional software required. I only have to use the full Adobe Acrobat at work to create print-ready PDFs or ones with clickable links and form fields. If I can avoid Adobe Acrobat I will at all costs.

Good on Microsoft for (finally) realising they don't need to rely on Adobe for viewing PDFs. Hopefully their implementation will not suffer from the bloat of Adobe's offering - and all this competition can only be a good thing to keep Adobe on their toes, maybe they'll release a version of Adobe Reader that is fast, secure and doesn't need patching every other week. We can but hope!

Anti-competition law? They had enough trouble with the "idiots that be" just bundling a web browser and a media player

But don't Adobe own the standard for the PDF format - I'm (maybe wrongly?) assuming that a licence fee is required to release software that can read PDF files. If Microsoft had to pay Adobe to licence their own software, wouldn't that get round the anti-competitive issue?

Or have I got that completely wrong? Wouldn't be the first time...

I don't know. *looks on wikipedia*



I guess being an open standard is what opens up Microsoft to anti-competition law. It's so ironic it's sic.

I think that is the reason. Microsoft wanted to do it long ago. Adobe stopped them. It is good that Windows users do not have to suffer Adobe Reader any longer. Well done Microsoft.

Why it has to have Flash embedded in it, I don't know, and that is a major problem at the moment, but on the other hand, the new sandboxed version is a lot better, in the security stakes at least.

The problem is, as seen by FoxIt and Apple's Preview, the security flaws which often crop up on the Adobe Reader are also present in the readers from other companies. Both FoxIt and Apple have had to put out numerous fixes over the years for their readers, often more or less at the same time as Adobe - although Adobe do seem to suffer from more vulnerabilities as the other two...

+1

Being a user of several platforms, PDF is the next best thing after good old plain text. My LaTeX suite typesets to PDF, my word processor export to PDF, every app on my Mac that prints can print to PDF.
It's a great format for sharing documents that don't need to be altered.

I'm not that fussed what opens it really. As long as I can double click on the PDF and it opens so I can read it, I'm happy.

Same for most people.

Aye, but I'm fed up of going to a Windows machine, double clicking on a PDF and it telling me I can't open it. If MS include a reader people won't have that problem any more.

Didn't MS get into some trouble with regards to PDFs when they released Office 2007 and changed over to .docx?

I thought they tried to implement PDF reading into Word (or something similar) and got jumped on by Adobe or another company.

That was my reading of the situation. Maybe Microsoft bought a huge license?

They wanted to print/export directly from Office 2007 to PDF and XPS. Adobe said no way in hell, users should still buy Adobe Acrobat to generate PDFs... Users could download the PDF export as an add-on, but Microsoft agreed not to include it as standard.

3 years later and it was a standard part of Office 2010.