Pdf=wtf

[Subjugation]

Will someone please explain the popularity of the PDF document to me? Because I can't understand why something that takes between 6-10 seconds to load on a broadband connection can remain popular with so many people.

Is it a free program? Or is it just easy to use and upload to the web? Is it like a MS Word-type program where you can format pages easily and if someone decides to read it, it becomes their problem to wait for Word to load if they want to read it?

Since I have to read PDF's a lot for various reasons (school and research, mostly), is there a way to configure my computer so I don't have to wait so long for them to load? Can I get adobe to load upon startup, for example?

[Ewan]

Will someone please explain the popularity of the PDF document to me? Because I can't understand why something that takes between 6-10 seconds to load on a broadband connection can remain popular with so many people.

Is it a free program? Or is it just easy to use and upload to the web? Is it like a MS Word-type program where you can format pages easily and if someone decides to read it, it becomes their problem to wait for Word to load if they want to read it?

Since I have to read PDF's a lot for various reasons (school and research, mostly), is there a way to configure my computer so I don't have to wait so long for them to load? Can I get adobe to load upon startup, for example?

Acrobat Reader is free

The official Adobe Acrobat Writer is about £300 (There's some freeware open source pdf creator programs though http://theopencd.sunsite.dk/programs/pdfcreator.php )

Also, from that site:

PDF (Portable Document Format) files are the de facto standard in electronic publishing, because the author can be sure that the document will look as intended on all platforms, regardless of local fonts or lack thereof.

Also check http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Document_Format

[tahkis]

Acrobat reader is free but the Acrobat program you need to make pdf files costs. Of course there are also free ones but I don't know their names.

[Sarien]

Also PDF, Portable Document Format, was among the first document formats that included easily images and text together.

Don't blame Adobe or PDF. It's your windows machine. OS X has seamless integration with PDF, including the ability to save as PDF in every program. Hell, even an OS X Screen Grab is in PDF format.

[DoTheFandango]

All OSX users should love PDF and iMage (look it up).

[Mr. Peanuts]

Exactly what I think. I can't stand PDFs, I despise them greatly.

[Arikel]

PDF's are great. They assure you that what you write there will be seen the way you want by everyone opening the document in any machine, so it has a huge portability... thats why it is used so much...
it's contents are also compressed following a very well know compression algoritm the Lempel-Ziv-Welch algoritm so its files end up being very small in comparisson to others...

[Emaho]

I can stand it as long as its not made by bill and the gang

[geekbot]

The popularity of PDFs:

The reader is free so you know your audience can view it.

The document always looks the same. (I've had many a Word doc that looked different- page breaks, fonts, formatting, tables- just because I opened it on a slightly different version of Word, a different version of Windows, or sometimes no other reason than another computer or a different day or something.)

Sometimes pdfs can get big but I would go insane if I kept track of how many times I got a 50k Word doc that was nothing but one page of plain text. That's 1-2k of information in 50k. They might as well read it aloud, save as an mp3, and mail it.

People just don't know how to use tools.

[brookus]

If you want to speed up Acrobat, remove the plugins you don't need (most of them).

llater,
Tony

[ConcreteSchlyrd]

PDFs are also phenomenal for publishing (Adobe making a program good for publishing? No way). On the off chance that I do a little DP for my job and need to get 200 11x17 full color bleeds, it's simple to just export the job to PDF and use that for printing. Always prints "right," no matter where I take it to get it printed.

[Richard Creager]

Hi, I'm Adobe, I make CPUs cry.

[DoTheFandango]

I just got Photoshop CS and I want to kill myself. This shit is hard.

[Nockm]

I just got Photoshop CS and I want to kill myself. This shit is hard.

It's counter-intuitive a lot of the time. Just keep playing with it and it'll grow in ya.

[DoTheFandango]

What the fuck is a Vector Layer?