It never ceases to astonish me that Adobe hasn't been persuaded to port Acrobat Reader to x86, where "persuasion" would consist of giving them the equipment, software, and periodic assistance so that it would basically cost them nothing to produce and maintain. By increasing the number of clients able to read PDFs that include the full range of features their reader supports (even if it's not a huge number), they'd be increasing the value of their pricey PDF generation tools (not to mention of the very expensive Framemaker on SPARC which I think can produce PDFs that could then be read on x86; but one could actually just have Framemaker anywhere print to PostScript and use ghostscript to convert that to PDF; or better yet, be cheap and use OpenOffice anywhere to do the whole job, although Framemaker is still quite cool for very large and complex documents, or in the extended version for SGML/XML; I wish OpenOffice could directly do e.g. DocBook SGML (or XML) at least, which would solve the Solaris documentation tool chain, not to mention making others that use DocBook very happy)
I'm not saying that the offer hasn't been made; it's obvious enough that I would be surprised if it hasn't. What I can't guess is why they haven't been interested in some such no-cost-to-them offer. So I'll do what I always do: blame Microsoft. :-) I have to admit though, that as long as Adobe isn't _selling_ anything but Framemaker to run on either version of Solaris, that they might well view the Solaris x86 client base as small enough not to care about even if Sun picked up the cost of supporting Acrobat Reader on x86. I think that still neglects the value of good will (as in less people avoiding Flash or PDF creation, for which they might otherwise make some money for authoring tools), but maybe they don't see that. Is the PDF spec (including optional stuff like digital signatures, embedded multimedia, DRM, etc) fully open and free to use, or is it somehow encumbered? If the former, they've got to compete on better tools or better availability or better support; if the latter, they've got some element of lock-in and may not care. This message posted from opensolaris.org
