Re: Evince

[Hib Eris <hib hiberis nl>]

Hi Ali,

On Mon, Aug 9, 2010 at 7:14 AM, ali . <ametedinov gmail com> wrote:
> Hello all
> We are an enthusiastic group of students from Lehigh University and we will
> soon be establishing an organization that will promote OSS in a variety of
> ways, locally and around the world. One of the largest projects we plan to
> do is to change the World Wide Web. MOST if not ALL webpages (containing
> links to PDF files)  that the average user visits have a sentence of the
> sort:
>
> "Files below are released in Portable Document Format (PDF) and REQUIRE
> Adobe Reader."   or  "To open the files you NEED Adobe Reader".
>
>
> The goal of super huge project that I am talking about here, is to contact
> tens of thousands of companies, government agencies, universities, schools,
> you name it... and encourage them to stop saying that the user NEEDS to
> install ADOBE READER, or that the files REQUIRE ADOBE READER, or so on;  and
> instead say something of the sort:
>
> "To open the files you need a PDF reader such as ......"
>
> And there "..." instead of Adobe Reader (or in addition to Adobe Reader),
> they should say an alternative OPEN SOURCE pdf reader.
>
> The reason I am sending you this e-mail is to ask whether or not we can
> suggest Evince as the Open Source pdf reader. Keep in mind that we will be
> contacting thousands of companies so the product we suggest must be stable
> and reliable and the users should enjoy using it. So do you thing Evince
> fits those categories? I know that not too long ago there was a very very
> annoying bug with selecting text, especially in two columns. Have you fixed
> that bug? If you still haven't fixed it, what is the maximum amount of time
> it will take you to fix it?
>
> If you believe that Evince is not ready yet, then which open source pdf
> reader would you recommend?

For Linux, you can certainly recommend Evince.

For Windows however, I think Evince is not ready for the masses yet,
because it misses an automated check for updates, making it vulnerable
when security issues are discovered in either Evince or one of the
libraries it uses.

Apart from the automated check, we also do not have the manpower to
keep the libraries in the distributed binaries up to date to the
latest security fixes.

I regret I have to say this, but I think Adobe Reader is still the
better alternative.


Cheers,

Hib Eris