Adobe Acrobat Reader Plugin

[Conrad Knauer]

On Dec 2, 2007 9:33 AM, Evan <eapache at gmail.com> wrote:

> Daniel, I personally find it really useful, but I can't speak for everybody.
> If everyone would please answer this impromptu poll:
>
> Do you prefer online pdfs displayed in the browser (acrobat reader style) or
> launched in a seperate dislpay (current Ubuntu style)?

I prefer them in the browser.  That's the main reason I install
mozilla-acroread :)

An anecdote though; years ago my wife used to *hate* having them in
the browser (or having them at all)...  it turned out it was because
her computer was slow and rendering them took a long time (even today
though one occasionally comes across large PDFs e.g.
http://www.saskatoon.ca/org/city_planning/resources/maps/index_nhoods_map.pdf
that render quite slowly :)  When she upgraded, she started to realize
why some people (e.g. me ;) think they're neat.  I think that's why
there are Firefox extensions like PDF Download
(https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/636)

"PDF Download solves the problems everyone has about handling PDF
files with Firefox. This extension, every time you click on a link,
checks if the target is a pdf file and in this case let you choose
what you want to do (open pdf file inside or outside Firefox, download
it to the filesystem or view it as HTML)."

Speaking of, that reminds me of how, long ago, when I used dial-up, I
used to turn off automatic image loading in pages to make them faster
(and then just enable it as needed).  Reflecting on this, it would
seem that for me at least, keeping my web browser fast was the primary
concern; I could always view documents externally at my leisure.

Which brings me to another one of your points...

> PS having the mozilla-openoffice.org plugin installed by default would be
> nice as well, assuming that people like inlined stuff like this.

While I do rather like ODF format stuff, I find that OO.o is a bit
slow on my system and so would prefer them to not render inline right
now.  I think that (assuming OO.o doesn't get a lot faster any time
soon) it will just be a matter of time until I get a system that's
fast enough to make having them in the browser acceptable.  Then I
will install the mozilla-openoffice.org plugin :)

Rather than a poll on ubuntu-devel-discuss, maybe try to find out what
the average CPU/RAM of Ubuntu users roughly is to see if installing
those packages by default makes sense...

e.g. no on my daughter's c. Y2K 500 MHz Celeron with 256 MB RAM, but
probably on my 1.8 GHz AMD with 1 GB RAM machine :)  If they're nicely
listed as "recommends" in ubuntu-desktop (like they did with
totem-mozilla), I won't mind uninstalling them if they get in the way.

> Conrad, a dedicated
> pdf plugin would be better (mozplugger also provides other plugins for
> multimedia which are redundant), but I don't know who would write it. The
> first link you provided is out-of-date, and the second just lists it as a
> possible idea.
>
> If it looks like this is a popular idea, I'll try and contact somebody
> higher-up.

I know, I just wanted to point out that people have been thinking
about this in the past; the blog link had a screenshot of a working
plugin though; maybe try writing the person for the location of the
code?

CK