JD on EP

Disclosures: I'm paraphrasing many of the questions to make them more readable. My info comes from the FAQ, and I've asked for some clarifications in internal email, but please do doublecheck my current understandings against what you can see yourself, thanks.

"What about XYZ PDF Reader?"

They can still read many PDFs, same as before. If they get a new PDF with ads from Yahoo, then those non-Adobe clients, or older versions of Adobe Reader, should just ignore the bits they don't understand. Ad revenue can be realized from audience members using Adobe Reader 8.1 or higher.

Wildcard: Portable Document Format is a set of ISO standards, and few PDF renderers publish any conformance data on their implementations. Lots of non-Adobe clients don't handle all PDF features as you might expect (sample), and most can't handle encrypted or protected content, but generally, other readers should just show the PDF without any ads, and without any ad revenue to the document creator.

"What if I don't want to see the ads, in a document I want to read?"

When you start a PDF with ads, it asks if it can connect to the ad server. You can tell it no. Or you can close the ad pane in Reader and just focus on the document. It's easier than in a web browser.

"What if I don't want to see any ads in any document, ever?"

The default is a per-document opt-in. You can okay this initial connection request dialog or not, and have the changes persist with a "remember my choice" checkbox.

"What if I'm offline?"

An ad connection won't be made. I'm not sure yet if it displays any old ads you may have previously downloaded for that document.

"Why did Adobe not want Microsoft PDF creation in Vista?"

Because of the risk they'd use their bundling position to make bad PDF and destroy the format for all... more here.

"Adobe is a joke as far as I'm concerned. They have no feedback method for bugs in their 'free' reader."

Try http://www.adobe.com/go/wish. Please keep it concise and functional... focus on a message that others can reproduce.

"Adobe Reader starts up slow and keeps asking for updates."

We're trying to improve in these areas. It's a focus inside Adobe. More news as we get closer.

"Wasn't there a story posted a while back about .pdf file exploits that were capable of compromising any machine they were opened on?"

True, except for the "any". PDFs could be sent as attachments to email which would then pass an address to flawed OS/browser combinations. Many journalists did report is as a PDF exploit, even though Reader didn't execute any bad instructions itself... better info (and timely updater!) here. Most of the plugin problems these days are actually browser/OS problems, with the plugin used merely to convey a message to a particular browser or operating system.

(I do not see similar security awareness and updates from non-Adobe PDF readers... please don't assume that the absence of news means the absence of risk.)

Some of the positive user scenarios people at Slashdot mentioned:

"Many academic conferences now charge for their articles, and as a poor grad student, I would rather deal with some ads than pay for a subscription. Sure, my school usually pays for me through their library, but I'll often come across journals that my school doesn't subscribe to. I'd happily deal with an ad to gain the convenience of accessing them online. At least, I'd like to have that option."

"Adobe gives Acrobat reader away for free. It charges money for its fancy publishing tools. So many of their paying customers are content creators that like getting paid . . . so yeah . . . I'll bet some of them actually asked for ads."

"This is an option _publishers_ of content will have. I think it's a great idea, actually. I'm quite happy looking at a few ads to get the content of Slashdot, the NYT, Washington Post, Gmail, Google search, practically the whole subscription-free part of the internet. If this model allows some publishers to put out stuff for free that they previously charged for, I think that's great."

"I'm a grad student, I do a lot of research for my classes online, and 90% of the papers I read are in PDF format. For the benefit being able to download these papers, I pay an annual fee for membership in IEEE & ACM to access their digital libraries. If they (ACM/IEEE) could recover their fees through showing ads in the pdfs, maybe I could forgo paying their membership fees and opt instead to download the ad-laden version."