Adobe Acrobat rant
Adobe Acrobat has been causing me an untold amount of headaches recently. I use Adobe Acrobat to extract the text and images from our completed magazine PDF files so that I can post them on the web site. But for some reason I do not understand, the latest version of Adobe Acrobat, version 9, creates very bad jpg images from its embedded images. If I extract an image in the bmp format, then it’s exactly the same color as the original. However, if I extract it in jpg format, it is red-tinted and ugly. You may have noticed that some of the photos on the site don’t look so great this month. It will be fixed soon, however.
It will be fixed because I found out that Adobe Acrobat 7, two versions older than the one I’ve been using, extracts jpgs better. And that’s not all it does better. First of all, it’s only about 200 megabytes on install, and takes about 2 minutes. Adobe Acrobat 9, with its Creative Suite associations, takes upwards of one hour to install on this old computer and has a disk footprint of over two gigabytes. Acrobat 7 is faster to start up, faster to read PDF files, and the jpgs it produces from image extraction look just like the originals. Acrobat 7 is what I wish Acrobat 9 was, and perfectly fits in with my needs. Maybe they should reference 7 for their inevitable upgrade to 10.
Update: At the request of Mr. Rosenthol of Adobe Systems I’m including four jpg photos to illustrate the problem I’m having. I probably should have done this in the first place:
Now I can get the same results with Acrobat 9 as I did with 7 if I extract each image as a .bmp file first and convert it to jpg with GIMP or Microsoft Paint, but that’s one extra step I’d rather not do.
First, you are comparing the installation of JUST Acrobat 7 vs. ALL OF Creative Suite – that’s not a fair comparison. But I will grant you that Acrobat 9 has a greater install footprint than Acrobat 7 – it does a LOT more.
What I don’t understand is the startup time. Acrobat 9 starts up MUCH FASTER and renders MUCH FASTER than Acrobat 7. have you installed any 3rd party plugins to Acrobat 9? If so, that’s what is slowing you down…Try removing them and trying again.
One thing worth noting is that Acrobat 9 is designed to take advantage of modern hardware with features such as GPUs and multiple processors.
As for the JPEG issue – we are not aware of any problems here. Can you please provide some sample PDFs and JPEG output?
Leonard Rosenthol
PDF Standards Architect
Adobe Systems
Leonard Rosenthol
January 20, 2009 at 5:36 pm
I did not expect an Adobe representative to find my blog at all, much less so quickly. I must say I am impressed. Welcome!
For your first point, it is somewhat true, however I only installed Acrobat 9 from the Creative Suite and one other component. At first I just tried to install Acrobat 9, but when I started it up it said I must install another CS component before using Creative Suite. So I installed Dreamweaver as well. It was necessary to take up so much space to use Acrobat 9 at all.
The second point about startup times may just be my old computer. I’m running an Intel Pentium 4 at 2.8 Ghz with only 512 megabytes of RAM. I think that is actually under the minimum specs for CS, as it requires 1 or 2 gigabytes of RAM. However, my boss sees no reason to upgrade this old box.
For JPGs, I’ll be happy to provide some. I think I should update the original blog post to include some, as this comment box looks a little sparse on jpg support.
If you’ll email me at matthew [at] koreaittimes.com I can provide you with links to the .pdf files. I don’t want to put them up publicly because they are over 250 megabytes each.
Matthew Weigand
January 21, 2009 at 9:46 am