Archive for the ‘softare rant’ Category
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.
