Acrobat Reader is a program from Adobe to display PDF files and is free for download from http://www.adobe.com . The free version for free download is 4.0 (Spring 2001) but there is a professional version of Acrobat with which you can edit the PDF file after creation. The version is 5.0 . The display and print quality of Acrobat Reader is much better than the free ghostscript PDF renderer. The greatest benefit of the Acrobat Reader is its availability for nearly every platform including windows and linux. Please use PDF for your email attachments, I'm sick of not being able to read word attachments. PDFs are usually also much smaller than word documents.

Users of proprietary operating systems such as Microsoft Windows and Apple's Mac OS use this program to view files stored in PDFs, or Portable Document Format files. Users of Unix-like operating systems, free or proprietary, usually use programs such as xpdf or GhostScript to view PDFs; however, these programs cannot always handle the full range of PDF features. Raph Levien is working hard on adding full PDF 1.4 support to Aladdin GhostScript; versions of same are released after a delay as GNU GhostScript, licensed under the GNU GPL. I tried a beta of Acrobat Reader for Linux some time ago; it ate 180 megabytes of core before I decided that enough was enough, and sent it a polite SIGKILL.

Linux
Sun Solaris x86
Sun Solaris Sparc
SGI IRIX
IBM AIX
HP UX
Digital Unix

The latest version available is 4.05. The reader uses Motif for the GUI. The Unix version seems to be able to read the latest PDF format fine, although that statement might not hold true.

The Unix versions, at least on Linux, come with two plugins:

Acrobat Weblink
Acrobat Forms Fill-in

Unfortunately there does not seem to be a Unix/Linux Reader with the option to search PDF files.

The Reader has one cute little feature where if only one window is open, with a PDF document, clicking on the kill-window button on your favorite window manager, will close the PDF document, instead of killing the program. A second click will then shut down the program.

If the user comes across PDF documents regularly, it might be wise to install Adobe's own Reader as backup to Ghostscript and Xpdf.