Hi there,
I'm quite interested in your Free PDF Readers campaign and was working
on a blog post for a progressive politics blog that I occasionally write
for here in Canada. When I post (not as often as I wish I had time
to), I'm mainly concerned about free software issues.
I very much agree that free advertising for a single software vendor
like Adobe for reading PDF's is very problematic in the public sector.
Just to research for my blogpost, I checked the websites for our federal
(national) government, along with provincial/territorial governments.
I also checked the sites for the municipal governments of a number of
major Canadian cities along with several university websites.
Almost all public sector websites had Adobe advertising on them,
sometimes even displaying Adobe's corporate logo. The one exception
that I did find was the Canadian federal government, which at least
attempted to be vendor neutral (if somewhat out-of-date) linking to some
proprietary and some free software PDF readers.
There is a page on the website for the City of Vancouver that talks
about website standards, and it too links to the Adobe PDF reader!
Here is my problem. There is no problem at all finding free PDF
readers for GNU/Linux operating systems. I use them all the time at home.
For people who still use Windows, there are some options. I've used
Evince on my Windows box at work and it works reasonably well.
Through your site, I've become aware of Sumatra PDF. I'm going to try
that out at work as well. Sumatra PDF looks interesting because the
site mentions that it can also read EPUB and some other types of files.
But I was looking at free software options for users of MacOSX and it
appears that there are few practical free software options.
I am not a MacOSX user, but looking at the linked site for "GV", I
couldn't make head nor tail out of it. Installing "Okular", involves
compiling KDE for MacOSX and the site hasn't been updated for a year. I
looked at the "Vindaloo" site and it appears that there has been no work
done on this programme since 2005! There has been nothing new on the
XPDF site for over a year and the site tells the reader that there are
"reports" of XPDF compiling on the MacOSX platform.
I've found that MacOSX users often have a cult like loyalty to that
OS. So they would certainly laugh at me if I tried to tell them that
they have a free software PDF reader option. They really don't. MacOSX
users are stuck in "proprietary land" when it comes to reading PDF's.
At least I can tell Microsoft Windows users that they have options and
of course GNU/Linux users already know that!
But I just wanted to check in case I've missed something along the
way. Maybe there is a free software PDF reader for MacOSX that
doesn't involve compiling software that someone is aware of.
If so, I would appreciate someone letting me know so that I could
mention it in my blog post.
Sincerely,
Bob Chandler
Toronto