Adobe Reader 9 is actually not too bad. It's ahead of Preview.app and Evince, and nearly as good as kpdf, beating it in page rendering and text selection (kpdf's text selection is xpdf-level atrocious with a popup menu on top.) The things lacking in the Adobe Reader would be that the page thumbnails are ugly (WWID: render at 2x size, bilinear downscale) and the search is substandard (WWID: strip out all the crap, simplify, show results as you type, show a good-sized result snippet with the page number and the page thumb.)
But yeah, fast page rendering, good text selection, decent basic navigation.
art with code
2008-10-21
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3 comments:
It'd be nice if you could save forms in most PDFs with it also; I'm hoping Okular turns out to be a viable alternative down the line.
If you click on the gear menu in the thumbnails panel, you can increase the size of your thumbnails as large as you'd like.
As far as search, Reader offers both simple Find as well as a more powerful search (even across multiple files).
@leonard: Yep, found that. Doesn't make the thumbnails any prettier though. The problem is that the renderer doesn't take the black:white-ratio of a pixel into account; a pixel is either black or white (+antialiasing.) Rendering at a larger resolution and scaling down will get you some extra information per pixel and a more representative thumbnail as a result.
The search workflow is overly complex. To search, you write your search string into the input, maybe check the boxes, and click search to go to the result screen. To amend your search string, you click on the "New Search"-button, enter the new search string into the input, and click search to go to the result screen.
The procedure could be: you write your search string into the input, the search result updates below as you type.
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