Acrobat

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From: peter (Peter da Silva)
Subject: Acrobat
Date: 20:37 on 23 Sep 2003
Apart from the general stupidity of trying to take a layout language
designed for a fixed-sized-fixed-aspect-ratio medium and force it
to play nice on the screen (I'm talking about PDF here, in case
anyone hasn't yet encountered the myriad stupidities involved with
PDF)...

Acrobat REALLY LIKES MDI, to the point where it implements MDI on
UNIX.

I hate it for liking MDI. I hate it for implementing it badly.

Acrobat is schizophrenic in the extreme about fonts. I've had it
barf and show Windows-fnords (you know,when Microsoft's Magic Quotes
show up as A-acute and the like) on *Windows*.

Presumably it's trying to convert everything to Adobe's proprietary
Postscript font mapping internally. Or maybe it's just stupid.

But beyond all that, Acrobot is a bloody stalker. "Oh" it says,
"you're running something that looks like one of the browsers I'm
fixated on. I will install myself as a Plugin. I don't care that
you have disabled plugins and removed x-pdf and all its relatives
from the helpers list, I AM ACROBAT and I'm more important than
your petty preferences. You meant to download that? Tough, I'm
going to take over... and I'm going to run so bloody slowly OpenSSL
will hit 1.0 before I'm finished showing you that first page.

"Oh, yeh, and I'm going to lobotomise your browser so you can't even
do anything to fix that while I sit there and try and fetch the
file through a really slow proxy.

"Yeh, look at this, I totall 0WNZ0R your browser, buddy. I'm so
L33T!"

AUGH.

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