PDF: Pure Evil or Necessary Evil?

I had long detested Adobe's PDF files and the Acrobat reader. It was, and largely remains, a big, bloated, cumbersome program that tied up your Web browser and took too long to load.

But it's a necessary evil if you want to present material, especially print material, in a very specific format -- as one must for things like consistent pagination. And Adobe has significantly improved it over the years. The way one navigates through the pages, in particular, is much more intuitive than it used to be.

But it still ties up your Web browser and is slow to load. However, one can speed up its load times if you eliminate a lot of its plug-ins. I found instructions on how to do so in an Inquirer article:

1. From the Start->Run windows menu, Open the "x:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 6.0\Reader" folder, where x is the right drive letter.
2. Find the plug_ins folder and rename it plug_ins_disabled
3. Create a new folder named plug_ins
4. Copy the following files from "plug_ins_disabled" to "plug_ins": EWH32.api, printme.api, and search.api

These directions are specifically for Adobe Reader 6, but I've just applied them to version 5 and they appear to work. So far. One difference is that 5 does not appear to have the printme.api file. And the plug_ins folder is (on Windows XP):

C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 5.0\Acrobat\Plug_ins

The reason I'm still using version 5 is because Adobe "in order to serve you better" (which may be the title of my next blog) removed the OCR function from version 6. (Or was it initially removed in version 5 and then restored later? Something like that.) That is, in the pro, commercial version of Acrobat 5 one was able to take a PDF and run OCR over it to convert it to a text document. The OCR wasn't the greatest, most accurate in the world, but it worked. Then Adobe disabled that and forced you to use their crappy online system for OCR.

Ugh.

So even though Acrobat Reader is up to version 7 now, I'm still chugging along with 5 because it is less crappy software.