Need a decent PDF viewer for Mac OS9

[coupdetat]

I can't for the life of my locate a functional PDF reader for Mac OS9! The closest thing I have is Acrobat 4.0 that came on my OS 9.1 disc, but that is pretty horrible--I can't even get it to associate to .pdf files on my computer so I have to open files I download through the "Open" dialog in Acrobat. I also can't save files that I'm currently viewing using 4.0.

Supposedly 5.x also works with OS9, but I can't find a copy anywhere. Is there some place I can get that, or maybe some other software that I can use?

 

[RacerX]

Acrobat Reader (and infact, pretty much any software in Mac OS 8/9) needs files to have resource information (such as type and creator) to work correctly via double clicking. And a PDF file that does not have this information (either with it originally or added to it by another application) is going to need to be opened by either directly opening the file in the open dialog box or by being dragged directly onto the application's icon or alias.

Good Mac OS 8/9 browsers would add the correct resource information to files being downloaded based on their extensions, but some of the last browsers for this environment weren't especially friendly about that type of thing. Further, Mac OS X doesn't worry about this type of thing either, so moving PDF files from Mac OS X to Mac OS 8/9 will yield blank resource information for them.

The last version of Acrobat Reader for Mac OS 8.6 and later was version 5.1. After some digging I found a version 5 installer (which you can find here), but I'm not sure what version of 5.x it is (as on all my older Mac systems I use the full version of Acrobat 5.0.5 rather than the Reader version).

Hopefully this will be helpful... I've had pretty good luck with still being able to read most PDFs on the net with Acrobat 5.0.5, but the PDF specification has moved on quite a bit in the intervening years.

 

[AdrianK]

Check this list out
PDF Reader for MAC

This thread is about OS 9, Mr Spam-your-site.

 

[InuNacho]

Yea Acrobat works great with PDFs, my Performa 6400 running OS 9 reads them perfectly.

 

[chrismacguy]

It looks to me like macintosh garden has a copy of Acrobat Reader 5.0.5 (This is what I have on all my OS 9 Macs) - available here.