‘As Necessary as a 73-wheeled Bicycle’

John Welch on Adobe Reader and Apple’s Preview:

I don’t think that Adobe understands that there is a market for a lightweight application that does a minimum beyond viewing, and does so with a clean UI.

It’s not like all Preview does is let you view. You can do annotations, notes, add links, simple shapes, bookmarks, etc. You can combine PDFs or add pages from another file, (something you can’t do in Adobe Reader) delete pages, (can’t in Reader), etc. You can even add files in other formats that Preview supports, such as PNG, JPEG, etc., again, something Reader doesn’t support. (At least not in a generic not-tied-to-an-Adobe-server-farm configuration. You know. The way normal people would use it.)

Preview doesn’t support the collaboration or Adobe server tricks that Reader does, but again, if you’re that big of an Adobe customer, why aren’t you just licensing Pro or Standard? (On Windows at least. Mac users only get Acrobat Pro.) Preview doesn’t support PDF portfolios, but so what? For one thing, PDF Portfolios are rather counter to the idea that PDF should be a universal format. Right now, even the ‘big’ alternative to Acrobat, FoxIt, is still working on integrating Portfolio support, so if you use Portfolios, you’re requiring everyone who wants to read your work to ONLY use Adobe Reader 9.

So much for PDF as a pseudo open standard. So much for Adobe not trying to make PDF an Adobe-only standard. Pull the other one guys.