Saturday, December 13. 2008
A critique on the FSFE campaign on PDF readers
The Free Software Foundation Europe has recently started a campaign promoting free PDF readers. The idea is to replace the tons of »Get Adobe Reader to view the PDF«-Buttons with ones that don't promote a proprietary product for viewing PDFs. On the page, they list a couple of free PDF readers for various operating systems.While I fully support the intention of this campaign, I think there's a big strategic misconception. As a small sample, let's take this PDF (an old advertisement for a Linux installation party). It's created with Scribus, based on a transparent SVG tux image I got from Wikipedia. On the right, you can see the PDF rendered with Evince (one of the three Linux-based solutions listed there). The others (kpdf and okular), although based on the same poppler-libarary, show a different rendering, though it's not better.
Loading the same PDF in the only listed Windows program SumatraPDF (which will, sad but true, probably the one most people will look for) gives an even more interesting result (see on the left). Though, after resizing the window, it changes it's opinion and renders the PDF, although still broken as you can see on the right (results may be false as I only tried it in WINE).Continuing with the problems, SumatraPDF is unable to fill in PDF forms. Luckily today Linux-based PDF readers are able to do that, though one of the listed programs (kpdf) is not.
In fact, those are no reasons not to start a campaign for free PDF readers. But it should start with a completely different focus, like »we have some coders wanting to improve free PDF readers, send us your wrong rendered PDFs« or something like that. And then start improving the free PDF readers. And then promote them. Doing it the other way round with a »there is no problem, just take a free PDF reader« message and then giving them ones with grave problems is just lying to people. There's a good reason why for example the Scribus project promotes the Adobe Reader.Oh, and before you ask, yes, I have reported the bug about the misrendered transparency a long time ago.