Problems with Apollo's PDF support
April 5th, 2007
After listening to Mike Downey talking about Apollo during his recent visit to Sydney for WebDU, I can’t help but think that their plans for PDF support within Apollo aren’t going to work on the Mac.
The reason? Mike Downey says, and I quote:
“PDF support will be completely available in Apollo, via the Reader”
That’s unfortunate, because no one installs Adobe Reader on a Mac.
Your average user opens their shiney new Mac and opens an email with a PDF attachment and can’t even tell the difference between whether it’s a PDF or an HTML email. Apple have made it transparent. The same goes for browsing to a PDF in Safari – you don’t launch a different application or get a crazy array of zoom, select and print buttons suddenly appear inside your browser chrome, the PDF displays inline just like any other page.
So what’s going to happen when a Mac user opens up “TPS Reports.app” (built using Apollo) which requires PDF support? There’s going to be a big what-the-fuck moment when they’re asked to install some unknown software called Reader, that’s what’s going to happen.
Is there a solution? I hope so. If Adobe can use Quartz 2D, we’re laughing. For any other fancy schmance stuff beyond the scope of the PDF 1.5 standard, use Adobe Reader.
See? Fixed.
May 23rd, 2007 at 03:07 PM
While it’s true that PDF rendering is natively supported on Mac OS, rendering alone is not sufficient. Many of our enterprise customers, for example, care just as much about PDF form and security capabilities as they do about rendering fidelity.
It’s also true that installing Reader could be made easier/faster than it is today. Using Quartz to render PDF isn’t an option for Apollo, but we are working on other efforts to address these issues.
regards, Oliver Goldman Apollo Engineering Adobe Systems Inc.
May 28th, 2007 at 12:24 PM
Thanks for taking the time to reply, Oliver.
I’ll be interested in seeing how you handle informing users that they need to install additional software in order to view PDFs in applications they’ve just installed. I guess only feedback will tell if people are accepting of it.
Cheers.