# what does acroread do apart from page mark up?

## Gentree

hi,

alerted by constant revving up of of my cpu fan I wanted to know what was pulling enough cycles to hot things up when I was basically no doing anything.

The internet connection was up and I had a few browser tabs open , mainly with pdf datasheets (opened from disk). Apart from that nothing , I was not even touching the mouse, I was elsewhere.

System monitor (conky) was showing about 43-48% cup load on Athlon-xp @ 2.3 GHz. Temp a good bit up on normal inactive state and a steady up and down net traffic of 0.1 k/s

`top` quickly confirmed acroread was the main draw on the system.

Now once a static page is up and displayed (not even being scrolled) I dont see what acroread needs to be doing for me that is consuming 50% of a pretty powerful CPU.

So what is it doing that I am not asking for... ? Anybody sniffed what it's does?

Now, the plug-in format is pretty convinient since your average google search returns nearly as many pdf links as html these days. Any suggestions for a more trustworthy (ie OSS) solution?

TIA, Gentree.   :Cool: 

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## didymos

I've long since removed acroread for it's general abuse of resources.  Currently, I just have firefox open an external kpdf for pdf docs.  Even with a big pdf (like a few hundred pages), it's not even in top's top 10 as far as CPU time goes, and memory use is perfectly reasonable given the document's size.  I'm betting it's similar for other OSS pdf viewers.  

I have no idea what acroread is actually up to when it's running.  I never cared to find out.  It was annoying, so I exiled it.

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## Gentree

thanks, I'll give kpdf a look, xpdf seems a bit feature challenged although the fonts already look a bit better than acro.

I was curious what acroread was actually doing. It clearly has an agenda far wider than displaying the doc I I asked it to display,  that's why I posted here on network/security. 

I'm not hard line against propriety software, I've use Opera as my main browser since the time it was a paying option because it did the job well, I use nvidia-drivers because they take the effort to provide top notch drivers for linux. Respect.

However, when I see a pdf viewer using ten times the resources than it would logically need, I'd like to know what it's doing with my hardware that it has not it's not been asked to do.

If someone can reply "arcoread is crap software , it spends 90% of it time chasing it's own arse." , fine, I'll delete it.

Elsewise, I think there's security issue that needs examining. 

 :Cool: 

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## adsmith

If you swing the GTK way instead of the QT way, try evince.

kpdf, xpdf, and evince all use the same PDF display library (poppler), so they are all "equivalent" except for their interfaces.

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## StifflerStealth

I use acroread because it's the only PDF reader that can read some of my PDFs. Anyways, I think it's just bad programming that causes it to some of the stuff, but there is that little advert in the right hand top cornor, so maybe it's updating that, but I don't see how that could use so much CPU/Memory. I think there are also checks on program updates and other stuff like that as well. I don't know if it's really security related. It's not like it's sending info back to Adobe on what you are reading, or anything, just stupid checks it's doing.

Cheers.

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## Gentree

 *Quote:*   

> I don't know if it's really security related. It's not like it's sending info back to Adobe on what you are reading, or anything, just stupid checks it's doing.

 

Well that's just the question , is it? Has anybody sniffed what it is doing. The traffic is pretty low and could possibly be accounted for by the pesky ad. but communicating other spyware type data would also be small volume. It would be interesting to know.

kpdf seems to make a reasonable job of rendering but with a few more inaccuracies in the font rendering that acroread.

Fonts are always crap in pdf anyway , that's one of it's major failings.

Sadly nobody can be arsed to write HTML anymore. PDF has become yet another bloated format for rendering a small amount of information poorly with a maximum amount of bytes.

 :Evil or Very Mad: 

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## StifflerStealth

You can also add (La)TeX to the list of formats people don't use anymore.  :Razz: 

I never actually done packet sniffing before, so I think I might read up on it and try to sniff Acrobat Reader.

In the meantime, FoxIt Reader is one of the best Readers for PDFs I ever used. It's Windows only still, I think, but the download size is about 2 megs and I think it runs in Wine. I haven't tried it yet in it, but you could give it a go.

Er ... scratch that. I just looked on the site, and they have a Linux version, but I don't know if it will work on Gentoo, so you can try the Windows version in Wine if you want. The Linux version is one executable file.  :Very Happy: 

http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/desklinux/

It's free, by the way. And I think it has better rendering that Adobe PDF reader at times and definately much better than kpdf.  :Smile:  Just look at the screenshot for proof.  :Wink:  It can even do text over and under graphics. :O

EDIT: Okay, the Linux version runs on Gentoo, but when I try to open a PDF, it closes. :S I must not have a dependency or the libraries are not in the right place. How can I fix this? Oh, and FoxIt opens in quite literally a blink of an eye.  :Neutral:  It's fast.

Edit2: this is the output from ldd:  *Quote:*   

> ~ $ ldd FoxitReaderLinux/ReaderLinux
> 
>         linux-gate.so.1 =>  (0xb7f56000)
> 
>         libpng12.so.0 => /usr/lib/libpng12.so.0 (0xb7f19000)
> ...

 

FoxIt is fast and really nice so I want to get this working.  :Very Happy:  I guess I need to do some symlinking, maybe. hmmm ... and it has no internet checking like adobe does.  :Very Happy:  It should tax your hard drives.  :Wink: 

EDIT3: I check their forums and it looks like it crashes for other distros as well.  :Sad:  I am going to post and see if I can get info on exact versions and locations for dependencies. It could be just a wrong version of a dependency ... hopefully.

Cheers.Last edited by StifflerStealth on Sun Aug 26, 2007 5:02 pm; edited 1 time in total

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## Rob1n

FoxIt Reader works fine here.  This is my ldd output (on AMD64):

 *Quote:*   

> 
> 
>         linux-gate.so.1 =>  (0xffffe000)
> 
>         libpng12.so.0 => /usr/lib32/libpng12.so.0 (0xf7f27000)
> ...

 

Hmm - mine's linking against libexpat rather that libxml2.

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## StifflerStealth

Robin, does your's work though?

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## Rob1n

 *StifflerStealth wrote:*   

> Robin, does your's work though?

 

Yep, works fine - opens up, loads and displays a PDF.  No problems at all.

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## StifflerStealth

I created a symlink called libexpat.so.0 to libexpat.so.1.5.2 in /usr/lib/ but ldd is showing that it is still not linking against it.  :Sad:  How can I force it to link against libexpat instead of libxml2?

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## Rob1n

Looking into it, it would seem that expat/xml2 are only pulled in via libfontconfig (they're not used directly by FoxIt Reader) so there shouldn't be any issues there or you'd see other things breaking.

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## StifflerStealth

How long have you had FoxIT, btw? Just curious.  :Razz: 

But mine crashes when I open a PDF and your's doesn't. The only thing different is that you are on x64 and I am on x86 and your's links against libexpat and mine links against libxml. Unless there is something else different like version numbers or something.

This is confusing. -_-

But, I thought there was a way to control what libraries a binary sees. I know there is an ebuild feature that sets something up so that binaries are given the correct paths, but I forget what it does. XD.

EDIT: Do you have the xml flag set for fontconfig?

EDIT2: What version of expat do you have?Last edited by StifflerStealth on Sun Aug 26, 2007 7:08 pm; edited 2 times in total

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## Gentree

thanks for pointing out Foxit, looks promising. I'd have prefered to move to OSS but I suppose a prop. reader that works cleanly is (would be) better than one that needs half my system resources.

Having said that it's not all rosy.

It looks like they only tested this on 64bit. My athlon-xp system has exactly the same issues

StifflerStealth reports.

Mine is linked to libxml2 as well.

It opens to blank page even if I give it a file name on the command line. Opening off the menu gets me a big fat segfault every time.

You cant force a binary to link to something other than what is was linked to when it was built. Symlinking libexpat will screw other things beautifully since they (expat) decided to break all programs using it when they changed the headers in moving to 2.0.  :Rolling Eyes: 

Best bet is to try their forums to see if anyone has it working on 32bit and take the qu. from there.

building fontconfig with -xml will make ldd show linkage to expat. Sadly this did not stop is segging on me.

 :Sad: 

 :Cool: 

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## Rob1n

 *StifflerStealth wrote:*   

> How long have you had FoxIT, btw? Just curious. 

 

I just grabbed it today after this seeing this thread.

 *Quote:*   

> But, I thought there was a way to control what libraries a binary sees. I know there is an ebuild feature that sets something up so that binaries are given the correct paths, but I forget what it does. XD.

 

You can set LD_LIBRARY_PATH which will tell it what directories to look in, but that probably won't help as both of them will be in the same directory.

 *Quote:*   

> EDIT: Do you have the xml flag set for fontconfig?

 

Yes

 *Quote:*   

> EDIT2: What version of expat do you have?

 

I've got 2.0.1 installed, but the 32-bit library comes from emul-linux-x86-baselibs and looks to be a 1.x version.

Anyway, you could try running it through strace or gdb to see where the error is coming from.

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## StifflerStealth

Okay, these are my versions and use flags for the dependencies of FoxIt. It would be sweet if I could get this to work so I would have a very clean PDF reader on linux.

```
~ $ emerge -pv libpng libSM libICE libXi libXrender libXrandr libXcursor libXinerama freetype fontconfig libXext libX11 zlib glibc gcc libXfixes libxml2 expat libXau libXdmcp

These are the packages that would be merged, in order:

Calculating dependencies... done!

[ebuild   R   ] media-libs/libpng-1.2.19  USE="-doc" 0 kB

[ebuild   R   ] x11-libs/libSM-1.0.2  USE="-debug -ipv6" 0 kB

[ebuild   R   ] x11-libs/libICE-1.0.3  USE="-debug -ipv6" 0 kB

[ebuild   R   ] x11-libs/libXi-1.1.2  USE="-debug" 0 kB

[ebuild   R   ] x11-libs/libXrender-0.9.2  USE="-debug" 0 kB

[ebuild   R   ] x11-libs/libXrandr-1.2.1  USE="-debug" 0 kB

[ebuild   R   ] x11-libs/libXcursor-1.1.8  USE="-debug" 0 kB

[ebuild   R   ] x11-libs/libXinerama-1.0.2  USE="-debug" 0 kB

[ebuild   R   ] media-libs/freetype-2.3.5  USE="X zlib -bindist -debug -doc" 0 kB

[ebuild   R   ] media-libs/fontconfig-2.4.2  USE="xml -doc" 0 kB

[ebuild   R   ] x11-libs/libXext-1.0.3  USE="-debug" 0 kB

[ebuild   R   ] x11-libs/libX11-1.1.2-r1  USE="-debug -ipv6 -xcb" 0 kB

[ebuild   R   ] sys-libs/zlib-1.2.3-r1  0 kB

[ebuild   R   ] sys-libs/glibc-2.6.1  USE="glibc-omitfp nls profile -debug -glibc-compat20 (-hardened) (-multilib) (-selinux)" 0 kB

[ebuild   R   ] sys-devel/gcc-4.1.2  USE="d gtk mudflap nls objc objc++ objc-gc (-altivec) -bootstrap -build -doc -fortran -gcj (-hardened) -ip28 -ip32r10k (-multilib) -multislot (-n32) (-n64) -nocxx -test -vanilla" 0 kB

[ebuild   R   ] x11-libs/libXfixes-4.0.3  USE="-debug" 0 kB

[ebuild   R   ] dev-libs/libxml2-2.6.29  USE="python readline -debug -doc -ipv6 -test" 0 kB

[ebuild   R   ] dev-libs/expat-2.0.1  0 kB

[ebuild   R   ] x11-libs/libXau-1.0.3  USE="-debug" 0 kB

[ebuild   R   ] x11-libs/libXdmcp-1.0.2  USE="-debug" 0 kB
```

Do you think these have any afect on the program? Something must be wrong with my settings for it to crash. You have the right settings since it doesn't crash. I guess Gentree has the same settings as me since it crashes for him as well. *sigh* It's only a preview version and they are working on a final version for Linux. I will be watching for it.  :Razz:  But I would like to get this figured out one way or another.

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## Gentree

 *Quote:*   

> I've got 2.0.1 installed, but the 32-bit library comes from emul-linux-x86-baselibs and looks to be a 1.x version. 
> 
> Anyway, you could try running it through strace or gdb to see where the error is coming from.

 

My money's on expat. Since this version's help menu shows it was from 2005 it would have been written for expat-1.x and will be sure to break if used with 2.x

Since they have not released an update since this "preview" in 2005 don't hold your breath for the bug fix.

 :Rolling Eyes: 

If you're curious and dont mind braking the rest of you system (well expat bits) try masking >=expat-2.0 and rebuilding fontconfig.

I held of for a long time on upgrading expat because of this crap but eventually I needed to move it up for some other dep.

 :Confused: 

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## Rob1n

 *Gentree wrote:*   

> My money's on expat. Since this version's help menu shows it was from 2005 it would have been written for expat-1.x and will be sure to break if used with 2.x
> 
> Since they have not released an update since this "preview" in 2005 don't hold your breath for the bug fix.

 

As I said, it doesn't actually use expat at all itself (nm -D -u ReaderLinux doesn't show any XML symbols), it's referenced by fontconfig which is then referenced by ReaderLinux.

Unfortunately I can't be sure of the versions of most of the libraries I'm using as they're installed via the emul-x86 packages so there's no real version info available.  I've got a 32-bit system around so I'll give it a try on there as well.

EDIT:  It dies on my 32-bit system as well.

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## StifflerStealth

Gentree: the windows version works brilliantly in Wine.  :Very Happy:  The new 2.1 version from here: http://www.foxitsoftware.com/downloads/

All I did to get it to work was:

1) Install and set up wine.

2) Install the VC6 runtime from here. http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;259403. (The first time you run it it ask for a place to save extracted files. It's just one file so save it to your Dowload folder where you DLed the first file, then run wine on the second file)

3) Install FoxIt using wine.

It opened a 300 page PDF in less than a second and I have a PIV, so this is worth checking out.  :Very Happy:  And it's actually displayed correctly too, which is a bonus.

In the meantime, I am going to play around with fontconfig and expat v1.  :Razz:  I know a few tricks up my sleeve.  :Wink:  The pure Linux version will be slightly easier to maintain than the Windows in Wine version.

EDIT: Ooooo. Interactive forms works on the Windows version as well.  :Very Happy:  Sweetness.

Cheers.

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## Gentree

Well I can no longer be bothered with wine generally, it's in a constant state or regression despite thier claims to be more stable since moving to beta, was it two years back??

VC fails to install on my wine   :Rolling Eyes: 

Could you detail which version you suceeded with an what you mean by "set up wine" ?

Thx

[EDIT] OK , I skipped the vc installer, seems this was not needed anyway. Foxit came up nice and clean on a freshly installed wine-0.9.44

Sadly the small text is somewhat deficient similar but different defects to acroread. Overall effect is about the same level of unreadablility as acro.

Graphs are a bit more clunky. Plotted lines are definately less well rendered.

Apart from that a very respectable reader that seems to work well on current wine release.

Thanks for pointing it out.

 :Cool: 

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## StifflerStealth

I have: app-emulation/wine-0.9.44 installed.

Then I just ran winecfg, which did some setting up for me. I changed a couple values to my liking, like setting it to Windows XP on one of the tabs.

Then I DLed that file, ran it with wine, all it does is extract a file, and then I ran wine on the extracted file. The installer says that it couldn't copy a file, I forget which one it is, but it's a bunch of output, but it's the same file. All the other files are installed, though.

Then I ran the install for FoxIt. I didn't choose the option to have it install a desktop or menu item. I manually made my desktop icon.

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