Thursday, December 16, 2004

Firefox spreads ... non free pdf viewers

If you have downloaded http://www.mozilla.org/press/nytimes-firefox-final.pdf you may have surely noticed that no free pdf viewer can display it, not xpdf(so no kpdf nor gpdf), not gv(so no kghostview nor ggv)

Reading the comments on the news item seems nodoby cares for it ... But i do, why is one of the jewels of the Free Software promoting non Free Software pdf viewers, i'm sure it could have been generated in a way that it looked the same and worked on free viewers.

Update: It seems it works with gs 8.15, the problem is that CUPS only comes with 7.07, any idea if anyone is working on CUPS? Will they ever update their gs version?

7 comments:

  1. How true...
    I thought it was just me.

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  2. No problem here (displays fine in KGhostscript, with gs version 8.15) -- wbsoft

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  3. It works partially in xpdf, you just don't get the grayscale logo effect in the left page... and it takes forever to load.

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  4. gs 8.1x-afpl is much better then 7.x, that is true. But the licence prevents it from shipping all kinds of printer. That is why most distris ship only gs 7.x so that you can print.

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  5. But there's already GPL Ghostscript 8.15 since 23 September 2004 and i don't see any major distro using it http://www.ghostscript.com/article/60.html

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  6. Hi Albert.

    I saw the PDF in xpdf (3.00-10 from debian unstable). It rendered very, very slowly, and I don't know if it did 100% perfect, but worked.

    However, I hope this kind of problems simply dissapear when really open/free standards become widespread, like XSL:FO or the OASIS ones for OO.org/KOffice.

    I've read on the dot, that maybe KPdf supports multiple file types in the future. That would be great. :)

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  7. It didn't display 100% correct for me in Acrobat.

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