acroread complains that it can't find libpangox.so . I have the latest pango package installed, which includes libpango.so and libpangoxft.so . As near as I can tell acroread works. My distribution, Slackware, has no package that includes libpangox.

'pango-0.13' provides libpangox.so : 14 (fourteen) years ago.

Looks like you found a very old "acroread".

No "acroread" exists any more.
The name was changed to 'adobe reader' years ago.

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I have the latest Adobe Reader, 9.5.5.1. It uses acroread as its executable.

i new there was a reason i stayed away from adobe reader as if it was a zombie plague
and why it never worked well

there are other rather good pdf readers and editors ( adobe-reader dose not even edit them )

Okular
Evince
and libreoffice4 / openoffice

Okular requires KDE; Evince requires Gnome; I use neither. I can export a file I create to PDF with OpenOffice but it doesn't import files. I thought the point of PDF was for Adobe to give away the reader and make money on the editor, for which reason they patent/copyright the format so they have a monopoly on the editor so they can sell it.

Curiously libpangox isn't a dependency of acroread (not according to ldd at least). Since it doesn't happen on every document perhaps the document triggers the calling of another library that thinks it wants libpangox. libeggtrayicon.so, one of Adobe Reader's libraries; I just checked.

yes it dose

i have zero issues importing pdf's into sdraw and simpress in libreoffice and no problems years back in openoffice