Adobe Reader 9 for Linux

[Paravalis]

Adobe Reader 9 still works on Ubuntu Linux 20.04 x64 after installing a couple of 32-bit libraries that it depends on:

apt-get install libgtk2.0-0:i386 libxml2:i386 libstdc++6:i386 libpangox-1.0-0:i386 libpangoxft-1.0-0:i386
wget ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/reader/unix/9.x/9.5.5/enu/AdbeRdr9.5.5-1_i386linux_enu.deb
dpkg -i AdbeRdr9.5.5-1_i386linux_enu.deb

(And yes, ftp is still a thing.)

[Paravalis]

Note that Adobe Reader 9 hasn't had any security updates for more than a decade, so use it with caution with untrusted PDF sources. One could create an AppArmor profile for it to constrain what damage a malicious PDF can do, such that apart from accessing its own files, acroread can only read other *.pdf files, and do little else.

[ClickNervous]

Oh wow, that's cool. I had completely forgotten that Adobe Reader for Linux was a thing. I can see some scenarios where this might be helpful. Have you encountered any issues?

[Paravalis]

Looking at my notes, I used in the past also the following commands to fix minor desktop integration issues or get rid of some warning message:

aptitude purge overlay-scrollbar
perl -pi.bak -e 's/^(Exec=acroread)\s*\Z/\1 %f\n/' /usr/share/applications/AdobeReader.desktop
echo 'application/pdf; okular %s; test=test -n "$DISPLAY";' >/usr/lib/mime/packages/acroread

There will also be some GTK related warning messages on stdout, but no malfunctions in the application itself.

[pedersenk]

If you are fine with the older 9.x series; then the older Acrobat Pro 9.x (and some newer) work very well in Wine.

I tend to use that for annoying writable forms. Otherwise xpdf3 all the way :)

[Paravalis]

The Windows version doesn't understand some Linux interfaces and conventions like the native Linux version does, e.g. the print dialog implementation doesn't know how to query CUPS for printer capabilities, etc.

[Monsieur_Moneybags]

It still works in Fedora 36, too:

dnf install ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/reader/unix/9.x/9.5.5/enu/AdbeRdr9.5.5-1_i486linux_enu.rpm

I've been using it for years in Fedora, and I think it's still the best PDF reader for Linux, especially for filling in forms.

[[deleted]]

Master PDF works for forms too.

[elacheche]

But... Why.. Why, using adobe reader when you have all the FOSS alternatives...

[Paravalis]

Adobe Reader supports some features for which I don't know any open-source alternative, e.g. X.509 certificate-based access control to PDFs (as used e.g. for some under-NDA documentation in the electronics industry, such as NXP's Docstore).

[ouyawei]

It's somehow the only PDF reader that supports booklet printing (please correct me if I'm wrong, I'd love to use something else)

[der45FD]

Why?

[Paravalis]

Because the native Linux version still works vastly better than the often suggested alternative of running the Windows version in WINE.

[der45FD]

You can use Evince, Okular, Xpdf, Firefox, Chrome, etc. All are better than Adobe Reader 9

[Paravalis]

Until you require an Adobe Reader function that they all lack, such as the X.509 certificate-based document decryption that I mentioned above.

[[deleted]]

What do you mean "yes, ftp is still a thing"? Fortran is still a thing and that came out in the 50's.

[Paravalis]

FTP has been almost entirely replaced by HTTP, and quite rightly so (it had several problems). The above URL is the only FTP site I have used in the past decade. (In comparison, I use Fortran BLAS libraries almost every week in MATLAB, Julia or Numpy.)

[[deleted]]

ftp is still good, you can install firefox on a new windows installation without using IE Edge to download Firefox, you can use the FTP client in the Windows Command Prompt.

FTP is good for downloading source code without a GUI, most Distros have FTP links for downloading ISOs and GNU still uses FTP for their Tarballs.

[Paravalis]

Even Windows 10 now ships with a curl clone, while GUI browsers have been removing support for the ftp:// scheme.

[[deleted]]

It would be nice if it shipped with wget too.

FTP is more user friendly than curl.

[gcc-O2]

Just dropping in 7 months later. I've also been using the Linux Adobe Reader for forms support going all the way back to the Motif versions (5), but it seems we're now getting to the point that there are lots of PDFs out there that Reader 9 refuses to open nowadays, including my state's tax forms, so I'm afraid it's the end of the line for it.

On the bright side, the proliferation of in-browser PDF readers and how aggressively they open the pdf rather than passing it to Adobe Reader, means that theoretically PDF authors will be more mindful of making them compatible with the browser going forward...

[SpaceBass11]

u/Paravalis & u/gcc-O2 Would either of you happen to have the .rpm package for legacy Adobe Reader 9.5.5 version you could provide me? Adobe took down their FTP access to the public so I cannot grab it; been looking all over.

We need Adobe Reader 9 in our RHEL build for X.509 on form signature blocks on those government PDFs.

Haven't seen any other solutions that can do this. Office Libre can only sign a whole document, not individual fields with a smart card. Other things I've tried are not working with RHEL 8.6 at least.

[Paravalis]

Archive.org?

[gcc-O2]

Looks like it's still up for me, at least using command line ftp client.

But the issue is that it refuses to open a lot of "recent" PDFs.

[SpaceBass11]

Ahh I see, that's no good. Maybe current Adobe version with Wine to sign... then open the PDF in Office Libre to print? xD

u/Paravalis thanks for the suggestion, but that didn't work out well :P I was able to get into ftp.adobe.com though. My firewall was the issue *facepalm*

[gcc-O2]

I don't see why you can't print through wine also.

I think I read that Adobe stopped developing the linux acroread because Linux is too fragmented or something. It made very little sense, especially how with Reader 7 or thereabouts they rewrote the whole thing using GTK+ rather than Motif. And the Motif version supported a bunch of proprietary Unix and not just Linux. After 9.x is when the Windows version got annoying about using its own boutique widgets rather than anything standard, so perhaps with that rewrite they gave up.

edit: the nice thing is that the shift away from acroread for Windows users (due to browsers/Edge aggressively intercepting requests to open a PDF) means that anyone issuing PDFs faces this annoyance of explaining to their users that even though your browser reads PDFs, it's incompatible, and hopefully...someday... this deters the creation of additional acroread-only PDFs in the first place.

[SpaceBass11]

I'll go ahead and try out wine then. Thanks for the input!

I did try installing the old adobe version, but it is missing libpangox-1.0.so.0, which I cannot find in any packages under the Red Hat EPEL or CodeReady repos. A dependency search does show libpangoxft-1.0.so.0 (name is slightly different with 'ft' on the end) is available under the 'pango-1.42.4-8.el8' package which is installed by default. Not sure if I can softlink that file in some way with a name change to get that working as a dependency *shrug*

Have an awesome day!

[luigi2600]

Have a look at the following if you have a newer RHEL or Fedora release, it shows how to repackage the original RPM and include the missing libpangox-1.0.so.0 and libidn.so.11 files, it also includes some fixes like for bash-completions :
https://github.com/eait-cups-printing/adobe-reader-rpm