I've seen many third party PDF viewers; I think all supported JavaScript. It's commonplace, not 'ridiculous' at all.
> Adobe acrobat (and maybe reader) is really the only app that fully supports the full PDF spec
The full spec is large and afaik has many obscure pieces, including 3-D, etc. Like many specs, they don't match reality and nobody takes completeness too seriously. For almost all users, supporting the entire PDF spec doesn't matter (does it matter for any user - does any person or organization use the entire spec over their lifetimes?).
Also, do we know that Adobe supports the entire spec?
Yeah, even Adobe doesn't really use the full spec. Or at least didn't.
There's a fairly big chunk in the spec of special presentation attributes for slideshows. When I implemented them I was surprised that slide shows produced by Acrobat didn't work. Well, obviously my implementation was buggy.
Er, no, Adobe didn't use their own slide show attributes for the slide shows produced by Acrobat. They used JavaScript instead.
> Adobe acrobat (and maybe reader) is really the only app that fully supports the full PDF spec
The full spec is large and afaik has many obscure pieces, including 3-D, etc. Like many specs, they don't match reality and nobody takes completeness too seriously. For almost all users, supporting the entire PDF spec doesn't matter (does it matter for any user - does any person or organization use the entire spec over their lifetimes?).
Also, do we know that Adobe supports the entire spec?