I guess more or less every Linux user has noticed that the official Adobe Acrobat Reader version is out of date and that Adobe has no intention to update it. So you are stuck with version 9.5.5, which is mostly okay especially when you need some features that are only available in the official reader.
And as a logical consequence, Ubuntu is not providing a package anymore in its newer releases. Especially when there are so many alternatives to the simple Reader functionality. But fear not, you can still install the Adobe’s Reader and there is even a .deb package on Adobe’s download site.
Because the package does not come through the standard repository you have to resolve the dependencies on your own… well, I mean tell apt to resolve the dependencies.
First install the package using the following command (change the file name as needed):
dpkg -i AdbeRdr9.5.5-1_i386linux_enu.deb
If you see error messages about the wrong architecture, then you work on a 64 bit system and dpkg needs a little hint.
dpkg -i --force-architecture AdbeRdr9.5.5-1_i386linux_enu.deb
Afterwards you should see error messages about missing dependencies. And now we fix them:
apt-get -f install
This should pull all missing libraries, install them and then wrap up the installation of the Acrobat Reader.
It seems that these steps are not enough on some 64 bit Kubuntu systems. You might have to install two additional libraries:
apt-get install libxml2:i386 lib32stdc++6
And now happy PDF reading… wait… can it be that easy? At least not on my Kubuntu 13.10. Reading on the screen is fine but printing is messed up. Every print out from the Reader scales down the output to about two-third of the original size. To make things worse, it does a really crappy job at scaling. The output is basically unreadable.