Yes, I know Acrobat Reader 7.0 is bloatware. But bloatware is bloatware... functionality is another thing.
Today... I download my car insurance tags so I can print out a copy for my wife (registering a car). You know how those little tags are... about a 2"x3" square of text, and the rest of the page is virtually blank. So I'm at work, not a skimpy system, a decent network printer (LJ4300N)... let's print shall we?
4 minutes for a PDF. 4 MINUTES. Okay okay, PDF is a vector PostScript nightmare... complexicated and stuff. But... 4 minutes... 3 of it was to actually spool the damn thing.
I looked at the printer queue while it was spooling. I was only printing 1 selected page out of 3, the the poor printer had to digest a spool of 122 MB! Mega... BYTES. Keeping in mind that the PDF itself (all THREE pages) totaled 62k.
So one of the managers walk by and ask me to go help out one of the sales guys, as his computer is acting "screwy". Being a desktop tech, I head on over and find the poor man's laptop choking on the harddrive. Thrash thrash thrash. Why?
A 6 page text only PDF was spooling to the print queue... 788MB! No graphics, nothing fancy, just plain text. The damn thing brought his system to its knees. Took about 10 minutes just to be able to bring up task manager to kill Acrobat. The poor man's laptop was gagging on the PDF for a good 45 minutes before I even got to it.
Then I go back to test a few things out on my system. Grabbed one of the PDF files of one of our company brochure. Mixed text, graphics, probably a 4meg file... printed instantly. Ugh.
On a whim, I took my insurance tag file over to the helpdesk where they use FoxIt... printed almost faster than instantly.
Kudos to Adobe for making such a comprehensive product. You know you're a quality software company when the competition makes a better product than the one YOU'VE invented. Way to go Adobe. Way to go.
Addendum: I did not mean for this to be an evangelize FoxIt thread... I was simply making a comparison. I don't use FoxIt... but likely will starting from Monday onward.
Today... I download my car insurance tags so I can print out a copy for my wife (registering a car). You know how those little tags are... about a 2"x3" square of text, and the rest of the page is virtually blank. So I'm at work, not a skimpy system, a decent network printer (LJ4300N)... let's print shall we?
4 minutes for a PDF. 4 MINUTES. Okay okay, PDF is a vector PostScript nightmare... complexicated and stuff. But... 4 minutes... 3 of it was to actually spool the damn thing.
I looked at the printer queue while it was spooling. I was only printing 1 selected page out of 3, the the poor printer had to digest a spool of 122 MB! Mega... BYTES. Keeping in mind that the PDF itself (all THREE pages) totaled 62k.
So one of the managers walk by and ask me to go help out one of the sales guys, as his computer is acting "screwy". Being a desktop tech, I head on over and find the poor man's laptop choking on the harddrive. Thrash thrash thrash. Why?
A 6 page text only PDF was spooling to the print queue... 788MB! No graphics, nothing fancy, just plain text. The damn thing brought his system to its knees. Took about 10 minutes just to be able to bring up task manager to kill Acrobat. The poor man's laptop was gagging on the PDF for a good 45 minutes before I even got to it.
Then I go back to test a few things out on my system. Grabbed one of the PDF files of one of our company brochure. Mixed text, graphics, probably a 4meg file... printed instantly. Ugh.
On a whim, I took my insurance tag file over to the helpdesk where they use FoxIt... printed almost faster than instantly.
Kudos to Adobe for making such a comprehensive product. You know you're a quality software company when the competition makes a better product than the one YOU'VE invented. Way to go Adobe. Way to go.
Addendum: I did not mean for this to be an evangelize FoxIt thread... I was simply making a comparison. I don't use FoxIt... but likely will starting from Monday onward.
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