[Scribus] Foxit Reader vs Adobe

[Marc Tompkins]

Thus spake Cedric Sagne:

All of us know that Arial is a somewhat problematic font. In particular,
a thick ll appears in PDF, when displayed on screen. I've known about
that and kept clear of Arial.

I was really surprised to export a PDF with Arial and discover the issue
does not appear on Foxit Reader, but only on Adobe Reader 8.1 !

Any explanation as Arial remains a pleasant font to work with?

I'm afraid I don't have any insight into why Arial sometimes works and
sometimes doesn't - but I can certainly attest to Foxit Reader being a far
superior product.
Since Acrobat Reader 5, Adobe's products have been getting fatter and
slower, until I just can't stand them anymore.  Foxit tends to open in less
than a second, even on my POS laptop, while Acrobat 7 or 8 takes upwards of
30 seconds the first time (it gets faster on subsequent PDFs, but only
because a big chunk of the Reader remains loaded in memory.)

While it starts up, Acrobat displays a list of the modules it's loading.
It's a ridiculous parade of bloat; the most glaring example is
"WebShoppingAPI" (that may not be the exact name, but it's something close
to that.)  By contrast, Foxit is lean and mean.  (Possibly a little TOO lean
and mean - if you want to use interactive PDFs, you need to download Foxit's
Javascript module.  It's not included by default.)

I have noticed a few examples of the sort of thing you mention, although I
hadn't narrowed it down to Arial.  I suspect that Adobe is guilty of the
Large Software Company heresy, which boils down to "We're big enough to
create our own standards! - and by the way, if you insist on using free
TrueType fonts instead of our patented money-makin' PS fonts, well, you
deserve what you get!  Muahahahahaha!"  Foxit, being relatively tiny,
probably feels a lot more pressure to be standards-compliant.
(Yes, I'm aware that Arial comes from M$, which is certainly guilty of the
Large Software Company heresy - but my point is that just about everybody
has Arial, you don't have to pay extra for it, and everybody - except for
Adobe - knows how to work with it.  That can't be a coincidence.)

There are a few third-party applications that insist on working only with
Acrobat Reader; apart from those, I have taken to replacing Acrobat with
Foxit on all of my clients' machines, and they thank me for it.  Highly
recommended.
-- 
www.fsrtechnologies.com
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