What I did:

Add the LANG envar set to ISO8859-15 è violà

Great!

When the languages are not set correctly does acroread just not work, or does it floor the cpu? my install works, but X and mozilla-bin take up one cpu combined ( 75% and 25% , respctively). i have tried the LANG=C but it didnt seem to change anything. if it helps i am using a dual proc P2 w/ RH9 stock kernel-smp-2.4.20-20.9 and I am also having the same problem with a single proc P4 2.8GHz with the stock Fedora kernel. I am including the beginning of my acroread script because i dotn have any idea what it means:

on the dual proc P2 the beginning (until the two are similar again) reads:

#!/bin/sh
#

ver=5.0.7
install_dir=/usr/lib/acroread/Reader

LANG=C
LC_ALL=C


#
# Prepend a colon separated environment variable
# $1 string to be prepended
# $2 environment variable
#
prepend()


and on the P4 it reads:

#!/bin/sh
#

ver=5.0.8
install_dir=/usr/lib/acroread/Reader

#LANG=C
#export LANG

NLANG="${LANG//.UTF-8/.ISO8859-1}"
export LANG="${NLANG:-C}"
NLC_ALL="${LC_ALL//.UTF-8/.ISO8859-1}"
export LC_ALL="${NLC_ALL:-C}"

#
# Prepend a colon separated environment variable
# $1 string to be prepended
# $2 environment variable
#
prepend()



why are there differences? (asside from just versions, i guess) and you can see where i changed the LANG on the P4 then commented it out because it did nothing... also, what is this NLANG thing? is that causing my problems?

thanks.

Unfortunately, I am on a Windows 98 machine in bed right now! I
can't look at my acroread file, but it appears as if you have a custom
build of the acrobat reader...I see you got it from an apt repository,
and I assume it was an rpm. I am not familiar with the rpm build.

I have been getting the reader (current version 5.0.8) from Adobe
direct as a tarball (not source)...it uses a scripted install and then
you manually copy the plug-in to Mozilla.

For me, just ADDING
LANG=C or LANG=en_US (for the US, english, anyway)
export LANG

makes the UTF-8 encoding problem go away in ALL circumstances
on that build. I have also had no problems using the plug-in
for Mozilla as the .pdf's load just fine within the browser and
also doesn't cause a major CPU load.

Here is what I would suggest. Uninstall the rpm for the program.

Get the .tar.gz from Adobe....run the installer as root (it will install
into /usr/local by default.

Then coppy the plugin to the plugin folder in Mozilla (the file is found
in the /browsers/intellinux directory within the Acrobat5 directory.

Edit the acroread file to add the LANG thing.

Make a sym link to acroread into your path...preferably
/usr/local/bin (so that you can command the program from
your account from the command line or make a menu entry)

See if your results are different.

I have had good luck with the Adobe builds of this program.

allofitsik, you say you have RH 9 installed... What is your current windows manager & desktop? (i.e metacity, sawfish, etc for the WM with GNOME or KDE (KWM)). I ask this because I had the problem of high CPU usage with Red Hat 9 with X and Mozilla. Try installing Mozilla 1.6 (if you need further asistance on this, just drop a line). However I don't think the problems will go away. In Fedora, on the other hand I have no such a problem with my CPU usage (seems to either have better optimizations or the libtop is buggy in RH 9), in any case ever since I moved to Fedora I don't experience such problems. A friend of mine, however, says that the magicdev program which lets GNOME do all the media integration, causes also these high CPU usage (in peaks) problems. Also try to see how's your CPU usage with nothing but the desktop showing, I'm pretty sure you'll have it at peaks of 20-25% caused by (or reported to be due) X.

We have the same problem with 100% CPU usage (on one processor in two processor system) whenever Acrobat is started as a plugin for Mozilla.

We are using RedHat 9 with Mozilla 1.6 and Acrobat 5.0.8 with LANG=C defined ......

okay, well i have finally had some time to work on this and, unfortunately, it is stil not working. I have tried the given suggestions, such as
1) adding LANG=C variable
2) upgrading to 5.0.8
3) not using the rpm and instead the tarball from adobe with and without the new LANG variable

and... oddly enough i am having identical problems... still acroread "works" but when it is active as a plugin in mozilla 1.4.1/1.5/1.6 (i have tried to use all, some in FC1 others in RH9) X still runs up to 75% cpu-usage with mozilla-bin a healthy 25%.
interestingly enough, this doesnt seem to be as "powerful" a cpu load as it could, for instance when i am running the plugin the computer is still totally responsive, even though the cpu load is maxed. also, it takes my computer 2 mins to get from 50C to 70C (under normal full load conditions (aka MatLab) this is much shorter. in fact, i dont _believe_ acrobat is capable of getting my comp to the 85C trip point, but, i digress.
in answer to Thetargos question, i am using stock fedora on my laptop which means GNOME/metacity. also, i have dealt with my magicdev problems already (another pain) and during idling (me sitting her with 2 instances of mozilla 1.6, 3 terminals, 1 nautilus, 1 gkrellm, and one evolution, and me typing this reply my cpu is bouncing contently between 1% and 0%.

i appreciate all of your help and am somewhat encouraged considering one other person seems to be having the identical problem to me. hang in there terrybarnaby, we'll get it....

thank you.

Hi,

Here is my ps listing (actually from the program "top").

X is using 77.4%, mozilla-bin is using 25.3%, acrobat is just at 0.7%

5759 root 25 0 102M 22M 1156 R 77.4 2.1 59:20 0 X
28920 terry 15 0 78792 72M 14932 R 25.3 7.1 9:49 0 mozilla-bin
5939 terry 15 0 2532 1928 1060 S 1.7 0.1 3:34 0 artsd
31067 terry 15 0 13380 9268 4288 R 0.7 0.9 1:01 1 acroread
1504 terry 15 0 7212 6544 3564 R 0.5 0.6 3:42 1 xmms
13051 terry 15 0 764 760 620 D 0.5 0.0 0:04 0 tar
1076 terry 15 0 556 384 272 S 0.3 0.0 3:32 1 ddcservertest
15628 terry 15 0 12760 12M 10264 R 0.3 1.2 0:01 1 konsole
914 named 25 0 2376 2152 1224 S 0.1 0.2 1:31 1 named

This suggests to be that there is a bug in the Acrobat Mozilla plugin or in Mozilla itself.
It could be that the plugin is continully redrawing the display or polling something ?

I have had this problem for some time (I think since RedHat 9.0 or Mozilla 1.4).
I have been used xpdf, but this is not ideal for my usage. With the release of Mozilla
1.6 I thought I'd have another go ...

Terry

for anyone that is still having problems with the acroread and mozilla, i found an alternative that works sufficiently to my needs ( ie simply seeing pdf in the browser without flooring the cpu ). I have now completely uninstalled acroread and am using the 'Plugger 5.0' mozilla plugin which points pdf files to xpdf. so far is working relaly well and it has also made some of the other media types easier to see... i can now view tiff, png, and bmps in the browser without haveing to download them explicitly. if anyone has any comments on this plugin, they would be muhc appreciated.... such as 'that plugin sucks: here is why'

ta.