Yahoo! Adobe working together

[francis]

This is both interesting and irritating (at leat in my view). Yahoo! and Adobe have teamed up (http://news.zdnet.co.uk/0,39020330,39171337,00.htm) which has resulted in a Yahoo! tool bar being added to Acrobat Reader. It will also link to an Adobe online function called 'Create PDF Online" that will "help consumers and business create PDFs". Surely that's called Adobe Acrobat full product?! I don't like my software coming with a built in toolbar that searches 3rd party products - it should be down to me to install something like that. Hopefully it's one of those toolbars that can be turned off. Anyway, it'll most likely be a good money spinner for both sides. I await Acrobat 7 with interest.

[David]

I noticed recently, when I installed Acrobat, that the Yahoo! toolbar was an optional install as part of Acrobat. Are you saying this is no longer optional? I simply chose not to install it and that's the end of it.

[francis]

Not sure, to be honest. The story that my link goes to was only filed today and I have for the last few years used the full product rather than the downloadable reader so I haven't seen anything like the toolbar you've mentioned. The article doesn't make any mention of it being optional, but neither does it say it's compulsory. I guess we'll wait and see (estimates for Acrobat 7 are late Q4 2004 or early Q1 2005), but I'll be mightily unimpressed if it is a compulsory thing - it's bad enough with Adobe's little 'look at what PDFs can do' button/link in Reader 6...

[Tom]

I prefer Acrobat Reader 5.1 to 6.0 (simpler navigation and simpler search) so I see the link with Yahoo as a further sign that the product is going downhill - as when the pact with Germany did nothing for Japan's reputation. I still use Yahoo infrequently but never find anything useful - it's a mugs' game. [Hope I have my apostrophes correct - re James B's earlier ventilation on the subject. I heard on the radio last night that some people are writing the city name as Leed's]

[francis]

I can't believe you prefer the search in 5.1 to 6 - the search facility in 6 is superb. In 5 it only finds the first instance of the term, forcing the user to repeat the search. In 6 you get all of the results in a bit of the surrounding sentence which makes for far more accurate and faster searching.

I don't know about just the reader, but on 6 full product you can even get it to search the PDFs on your hard drive which is a real boon.

[Tom]

Maybe I'm just being lazy about not setting my preferences, but I don't like having the navigation at the foot of the screen and I don't like one third of my screen space, on the right side, being occupied by a search box. It looks like a MS idea to me. As for searching speed, if you create/use an index then searching is fast in 5.1. Adobe also annoyed me by setting the full product, rather than the reader, as the default programme to open when you click on a .pdf. I put this right eventually but only after it had bugged me for months. I prefer SIMPLICITY to multi-functionality and might even start carrying a mobile phone if they make one with no functions and big buttons for half-blind OAPs. At present I need glasses to find the buttons. Yes, I'm a GOM.

[Tom]

I had a pre-press draft of an article sent to me yesterday. It was fully laid out with illustrations - and sent as a .pdf with the comment that 'this layout was generated automatically from a database'. This could well be the future for office documents. Just write the text for a letter into a database, select the addressee from a contacts list and press the button. Far less fiddle for the writer and much more convenient storage with fewer bytes.

[Tom]

Google desktop search does not search .pdf documents. I wonder why.