[free-sklyarov] DOE on Adobe Acroread 4 & 5 reader having bugs

[Craig Carey]

Here is comments adverse to the Adobe Acrobat reader software of
Adobe. The blurry fonts of the Adobe Acrobat reader is another problem
that is not mentioned in the list. on this page (partly reproduced
below):

      http://lanl.arxiv.org/help/ar-testimonials.html


| Problems with Adobe Acroread
|
| Missing Fonts in particular in AR 4.0
|
| We have received many reports about missing minus signs and
| parentheses in PDF display and printout from acroread version 4.0. A
| good summary of these issues can be found at
| <http://www.micropress-inc.com/acr4bugs.htm> .
|

That website says that version 5 seems to be roughly a worse choice than
version 4.

| New Problems with AR 5.0
|
| Acroread 5 only partially solves these problems and introduces many
| new ones, see <http://www.micropress-inc.com/acr5bugs.htm>
|
| Testimonials from Internet Newsgroups
|
| Acrobat is so named because of the contortions one must do to get
| around its bugs. -- Donald Arseneau.
...
| Also, Adobe like most large software companies apparently has a number
| of interesting policies such as:
|
|    Do not keep a test suite of cases that led to problems in the past;
|
|    Do not keep a list of bugs in previous versions to make sure they are
|    not repeated;
|
|    Do not keep programmers around from the last set of revisions --
|    always hire new ones, and promote good programmers to management and
|    marketing;
|
|    Do not respond at all to bug reports in between development cycles --
|    simply discard them, since at that time no programmer is assigned to
|    the product;
|
|    Make it next to impossible to report bugs (it cost me $20 of
|    "technical support" phone time to report a bug in Distiller - which,
|    of course, was not fixed); build a force shield to insulate developers
|    from users to make sure they do not make the mistake of wasting
|    precious time on fixing bugs, or listening to users requests;
|
| One consequence is that we have seen the same bugs repeated on a
| regular basis, more or less every time a new release of an application
| comes out --- just when it comes to fonts for e.g.:
|
|    Treat strings as null delimited - causing problems with character
|    code 0;
Etc.


That is a webpage of LANL (the Los Alamos National Laboratories; with the
website saying it is "operated by the University of California for the
National Nuclear Security Administration of the Department of Energy).


Craig Carey
Auckland