UPDATE: Install Adobe Acrobat Reader 8.1.2 on Ubuntu 8.04
It was recently pointed out to me on one of our local mailing lists that my previous tutorial on installing Adobe’s Acrobat reader for Firefox no longer worked. It seems that those packages have been pulled from the repository since that writing. I wanted to take a few minutes and give an update on a different method of installing Adobe’s Acrobat reader.
Installing Adobe Acrobat
It appears now that the simplest way to install the Adobe Acrobat Reader is to get the package directly from Adobe’s website. Try following these steps to find the .deb package and install that.
- Visit the Adobe Reader download page.
- Select “Linux”, Select “Linux – x86 .deb”, Select your language.
- Click the “Continue” button.
- Click “Download Adobe Reader” to begin the download.
- You can then “Open with…” to open it with the package installer directly, or “Save as” to be distributed to your other machines and installed manually via double-click on the package.
If you’re going to call the reader directly you’ll also need to configure two more items within the Adobe Reader preferences. Open the reader via “Applications > Office > Adobe Reader 8” and it should give you a message concerning a libgtkembedmoz.so. After you click OK it’ll give you a blank window with no options. Switch back to the previous window and select “Edit > Preferences > Internet” as suggested by the previous notification window.
In the “Select Browser” area near the bottom put in the following two paths to pacify the Adobe Reader:
/usr/bin/firefox
/usr/lib/firefox
At this point you can save and close your changes and restart the application. This time you shouln’t see any errors and it should work as planned. I have noticed that no errors are reported when directly opening a .pdf from the web–everything just opens. This seems to only happen when launching the reader directly.
Personally I prefer the installed .pdf reader, Evince that already comes with my installation. I haven’t personally had any need to run the non-free Adobe version, but apparently some do. I hope these steps work for you and thanks again for reminding me that my previous steps don’t work.
Don’t we have lots of great open source PDF readers already? I use konqueror with kpdf, and its nicer than on windows. (No seriously, acrobat sucks on every operating system.) Can the open source readers not be integrated into firefox, or what?
Why not just add the Medibuntu repos and install Acrobat Reader?
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Medibuntu
Unfortunately, as with Flash, Adobe doesn’t seem to have heard of AMD-64 machines.
Thanks for this tutorial – been meaning to get acroread running again.
Level 1, like it or loath it, acroread is still the industry-standard PDF reader. Even open-source projects like Scribus use acroread as their reference reader.
That said, it’s a bloated piece of work. 47Mb for one deb? That’s nuts. At least it doesn’t install a bunch of extra Adobe crap like the Windows installer does.
I always evince for day-to-day stuff, but having acroread around is useful for the little bit of DTP work I do.
This fix my issue.Thank you got the information
Well evince doesn’t read some pdf documents as well as does acroread, that’s the only reason why I’m using it. Evince reads some documents and it has text and image errors.
No download for x64…this stinks.
Acrobat reader is still the best reader in terms of features.
I mostly like the very good font rendition, which to the best of my knowledge, is very good, and the fact that you can change the default background color to something more likable that plain (too) bright white.
I wish Adobe would stop the nonsense and release acrobat under open source license.
IIRC, none of the free readers allow input on fillable forms.
Ok, thanks and all but now I have a little problem, after trying acrobat I decided I didn’t need it. So after uninstalling it, Kpdf stopped from working, crashed all the time, and just to try I reinstalled acrobat and then kpdf worked like a charm and stopped working after a second acrobat uninstall.
I’m using gnome by the way.
Any idea?
jigal, you can change the background with KPDF as well :
configure Kpdf / Accessibility / dark color and light color
To zouhair:
My suggestion, don’t use a KDE PDF reader in Gnome. Try evince or xpdf to see if they meet your needs instead.
FWIW, I just installed Reader 8.1.2 but didn’t get any nasty errors about libgtkembedmoz.so.
Regardless, many thanks for the instructions – I’m new to Linux and am having a nightmare finding the paths to files so you saved me a lot of digging!
i need it for amd64X2
mi laptop is a Toshiba satellite with ubuntu 7.10
for amd64,
installed acroread via mediubuntu as suggested by william above.
it works for me
“I haven’t personally had any need to run the non-free Adobe version, but apparently some do.”
The *only* reason I use reader in linux is the invaluable snapshot tool.
In case you need to know, although acrobat does not directly let you save a filled form (only reason I can see why one would use it, BTW), a simple workaround is to print to file… Voila’!
When I downloaded a pdf from gmail evince started up and then I ended up in a window that says Microsoft Word in front of the file name in the title. I can’t get into a select mode – I want to copy a portion of the document. Ideas?
Jeff
merçi
Follow what it says at William’s link: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Medibuntu about installing all the Medibuntu repositories’ details, then do ‘sudo apt-get install acroread’ and after that is installed you’ll probably also want to install the “recommended packages”, so do ‘sudo apt-get install acroread-plugins’ and ‘sudo apt-get install mozilla-acroread’
Worked beautifully for me after closing all firefox windows and restarting it. First PDF doc browsed to came up in browser window with the adobe plugin, even on a AMD64 PC.
Thanks William.
On Ubuntu 7.10 I had to uninstall the previous version of Acrobat Reader using Synaptic to get Reader 8 to install.
thanks……..
Hello guys, I need to convert a JPEG image into PDF. Pls tell me how to go about it
Hi Mary I have been using Magic PDF software and it works pretty well to convert JPEG image into PDF. You can check it out at. http://www.magic-PDF.com. Have a great day! albert
Hello guys, I need to edit a PDF template I downloaded from the Internet. Pls help me.
Ans: Hi,
I have been using Magic PDF software and it works pretty well for PDF editing, creation and conversion needs. You can check it out at. http://www.magic-PDF.com.
Good Luck!!
Oliver
Ans: Hi,
I have been using Magic PDF software and it works pretty well for PDF editing, creation and conversion needs. You can check it out at. http://www.magic-PDF.com.
Good Luck!!
Oliver
Ans: Hi,
I have been using Magic PDF software and it works pretty well for PDF editing, creation and conversion needs. You can check it out at. http://www.magic-PDF.com.
Good Luck!!
Oliver
: Hi Jobin,
I have been using Magic PDF software and it works pretty well for PDF editing, creation and conversion needs. You can check it out at. http://www.magic-PDF.com.
Good Luck!!
Oliver
: Hi Jobin,
I have been using Magic PDF software and it works pretty well for PDF editing, creation and conversion needs. You can check it out at. http://www.magic-PDF.com.
Good Luck!!
Oliver
: Hi Jobin,
I have been using Magic PDF software and it works pretty well for PDF editing, creation and conversion needs. You can check it out at. http://www.magic-PDF.com.
Good Luck!!
Oliver
Gracias por compartir tal, artículo interesante e informativo. – Basura