Displaying PDF files with Adobe Acrobat Reader

Non-WYSIWYG publishing can be very paper- intensive if you send a Groff or LaTeX document to the printer each time you want to make a change to the document's content or formatting. To save paper and time spent running around, you can use some print preview programs to display a document on the screen as it will appear on the printed page. The following sections describe the Adobe Acrobat reader for displaying Portable Document Format (PDF) files.

The Portable Document Format (PDF) provides a way of storing documents as they would appear in print. With Adobe Acrobat Reader, you can view PDF files in a very friendly way. Adobe Acrobat makes it easy to move around within a PDF file. A PDF file may include hyperlinks , a table of contents, graphics, and a variety of type fonts.

A recent version of the Adobe Acrobat Reader (version 7) is available in RPM format from Adobe.com. This version can use many PDF features that aren't available in other PDF readers, including some new compression features in version 1.4. (While you are at it, you can install the Acrobat Plug-in RPM, to use the same reader to play PDF content when you browse the Web).

After you install Adobe Acrobat Reader, type the following command to start the program:

 $  acroread  

Click File Open, and then select the name of a PDF file you want to display. Figure 6-12 shows an example of a PDF file viewed in Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Figure 6-12: Display PDF files in the Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Acrobat Reader has a lot of nice features. For example, you can display a list of bookmarks alongside the document and click on a bookmark to take you to a particular page. You can also display thumbnails of the pages to quickly scroll through and select a page.

Using the menu bar or buttons , you can page through the PDF document, zoom in and out, go to the beginning or end of the document, and display different views of the document (as well as display bookmarks and page thumbnails). To print a copy, click File Print.