Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable(vincentuden.xyz)
vincentuden.xyz
Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable
https://www.vincentuden.xyz/blog/pdf-reader
173 comments
Personally I'm still impressed by Adobe's work there.
They designed the PDF format but still manage to have the worst PDF reader on the entire market.
It aint easy being cheesy. It’s truly impressive how they’ve been able to lock in and lock down the entire corporate world for 2 decades while being that mediocre.
Also equally baffling how mediocre all the alternatives are.
Also equally baffling how mediocre all the alternatives are.
> the entire corporate world for 2 decades while being that mediocre
Because most of the corporate world is mediocre. Employees put up with a lot of BS every day, Acrobat and PDFs are just the icing on the cake. And they're risk adverse. "This is what I know".
It's like when the complaints Windows and Office come around (for decades). People got used to it enough, and don't have to pay for it, so why change.
All periods can be replaced by ? if you want...I'm merely speculating having been in all sizes of companies by now. :)
Because most of the corporate world is mediocre. Employees put up with a lot of BS every day, Acrobat and PDFs are just the icing on the cake. And they're risk adverse. "This is what I know".
It's like when the complaints Windows and Office come around (for decades). People got used to it enough, and don't have to pay for it, so why change.
All periods can be replaced by ? if you want...I'm merely speculating having been in all sizes of companies by now. :)
Your browser is an alternative, if you want it to be! I read PDFs in the browser quite a bit.
This works for about 95% of the documents.
For the rest you need a purpose built reader. Often Sumatra or other open source readers will work with the more complex functions in PDFs (signing, bill processing, etc).
I have Acrobat installed on my corp laptop, but I use Sumatra rather than Acrobat, because I like my reader to simply be a reader instead of a 13GB bloated piece of garbage. I'm also a big fan of my reader not crashing at the slightest breeze.
For the rest you need a purpose built reader. Often Sumatra or other open source readers will work with the more complex functions in PDFs (signing, bill processing, etc).
I have Acrobat installed on my corp laptop, but I use Sumatra rather than Acrobat, because I like my reader to simply be a reader instead of a 13GB bloated piece of garbage. I'm also a big fan of my reader not crashing at the slightest breeze.
Some companies are more focused on the PvP aspects of business.
Until LLM models came along, I was convinced the first file format to gain sentience would be a PDF.
It can contain vector drawings, fonts, bitmap images, formatting, hypertext, plain text, rasterization hints (for everything from watch displays to 10 ton multicolor printing presses), layers, annotations, metadata, versioning, multiple languages, interactive forms, digital signatures/encryption, DRM, audio, video, 3D objects including CAD drawings, accessibility info, captions, file attachments and yes, even JavaScript. (And probably more - most of that was off the top of my head plus a quick search to remind myself.)
I'm personally amazed that any application can successfully open and edit a PDF document without creating a black hole in space, so Acrobat's continued suckiness into its third decade doesn't surprise me in the least.
It can contain vector drawings, fonts, bitmap images, formatting, hypertext, plain text, rasterization hints (for everything from watch displays to 10 ton multicolor printing presses), layers, annotations, metadata, versioning, multiple languages, interactive forms, digital signatures/encryption, DRM, audio, video, 3D objects including CAD drawings, accessibility info, captions, file attachments and yes, even JavaScript. (And probably more - most of that was off the top of my head plus a quick search to remind myself.)
I'm personally amazed that any application can successfully open and edit a PDF document without creating a black hole in space, so Acrobat's continued suckiness into its third decade doesn't surprise me in the least.
The fact that they called it "portable" document format and now I regularly get PDFs that display "Please open this file in Acrobat" if opened in any other viewer... Great stuff.
Wait, this actually happens?
Constantly. They added a bunch of scripting extensions so a lot of fillable forms render a message telling you to use Acrobat until all of that stuff executes.
Those are probably PDFs with XFA forms. Not very common in general but if you often get PDFs from sources that use that then yeah you'll see it all the time. Good news it that it was deprecated, it's not in PDF 2.0.
Happens often if you're using documents that are signed with a smart card.
Sadly, browsers can't sign PDFs yet either.
This might actually be causal to an extent. A sibling comment mentions the early-mover advantage they got for their software from originating the format (initially in a locked-down form—IIRC, they actually prohibited Microsoft from including a PDF export feature in Office in the 90s). But another contribution to this is that there’ve put an absolutely unbelievable amount of stuff into the format while they were still milking it (how many flavours of PDF forms are there? three I think, one of which is XForms submitted over something equally execrable? also JavaScript support of course, can’t forget about the JavaScript support); and Acrobat is the only piece of software that supports—has to support—them all.
They created the format, which means they don't need to make a good reader. Simple inertia guarantees them a good amount of revenue selling to corporations, and those contracts are usually quite juicy, especially the ones where the person signing the contract isn't forced to use said product. (cough Microsoft Teams)
Improving the product would be a significant amount of work, cost a lot of money, and why do that when you can just sit back and rack in the cash?
Improving the product would be a significant amount of work, cost a lot of money, and why do that when you can just sit back and rack in the cash?
A month ago, I opened an old PDF file on MacOS Monterey and found that Preview couldn't display the images in it. Chrome browser on Monterey shows inlined images. I've read this PDF on Windows for years. For Monterey I had to convert it with some online converter in order to watch inlined images.
My favorite "the worst PDF reader" is MacOS Preview.
My favorite "the worst PDF reader" is MacOS Preview.
> They designed the PDF format but still manage to have the worst PDF reader on the entire market.
Hm. I hate Acrobat but it is still the best pdf program on Windows.
pdf.js is a parody if you have more than 3 pages.
Hm. I hate Acrobat but it is still the best pdf program on Windows.
pdf.js is a parody if you have more than 3 pages.
This is a lot like Microsoft having Outlook for multiple decades and it's somehow still the very worst email client.
Half my org still uses Outlook classic and even it's laughably unstable.
Half my org still uses Outlook classic and even it's laughably unstable.
No mention of Sumatra PDF[1]? Windows (only), open source, uses MuPDF.
[1] https://www.sumatrapdfreader.org/
[1] https://www.sumatrapdfreader.org/
Our favorite is still PDF-XChange [1] which has been our daily driver for years. Only dislike is the difficulty in opening a document in a separate application window. It's either everything in one window or everything in its own window.
[1] https://www.pdf-xchange.com/
[1] https://www.pdf-xchange.com/
I had to ctrl+f the blogpost after reading because I couldn't believe they ended it without even a mention of SumatraPDF!
What a great PDF reader. kjksf, thank you!
What a great PDF reader. kjksf, thank you!
Ohh, daily driver here. You can configure external apps to open the pdf (in a given page) and choose your hotkey for it, and with some effort, that supercharges the reading. With some scripting and using the grand pymupdf library one can customize it as deeply as one wishes.
Sumatra PDF totally slipped my mind. I think I had issues with getting VIM bindings to work as I wanted to, but they for sure deserve a mention.
Firefox also let's you edit PDFs so thats been my go to for awhile now.
ok thank you so much... finally an open source pdf reader thats not acrobat that works (hopefully, still testing). on the issue of pdf forms, my gosh they just should not exist, thats what web pages are for.
pdf forms are pretty convenient when you need to fill it in, print and send to government by snail main or show in person or sent digitally. Happens in some places more often than in others.
They're also amazing for digital TTRPG sheets. You can send around the PDF form, and everyone can fill out and store their own sheet, print it, send it back to the GM, whatever the group needs.
To be clear, there are multiple kinds of PDF form. GGP might have had experience with one of those that are actually supposed to be submitted over the Internet straight from the PDF reader. (Not only is this a thing that Adobe did to their format, it is IIRC a thing that they did to it in more than one way.)
I love sumatra but I can't figure out how to sign with it.
Acrobat Reader is one of the more poorly engineered programs I’ve used. And it recently asked me to sign in an account and give Adobe money to open a PDF??
Unfortunately I need to sign PDFs often (using an image of my physical signature or a digital certificate), and I haven’t used that didn’t suck more than Adobe in this. I haven’t tried Okular for this and Evince seemingly didn’t support this - but Preview (although an extremely great document reader in most regards) didn’t let me select an image of my signature, but asked me to either sign on the trackpad with my finger (how do you make that not look like you had nerve damage?) or show a picture of my signature to the webcam of my Mac so it would do extraction on it (which didn’t work at all after 20 minutes of attempting, but also why can’t I just select a photo??). Finally I figured out pdfjs in Firefox recently shipped image-based signing (still waiting on certs)
Of course, I could have edited the PDF in a better editor (GIMP even!), but.. why is such seemingly simple and common PDF work a horror show?
Unfortunately I need to sign PDFs often (using an image of my physical signature or a digital certificate), and I haven’t used that didn’t suck more than Adobe in this. I haven’t tried Okular for this and Evince seemingly didn’t support this - but Preview (although an extremely great document reader in most regards) didn’t let me select an image of my signature, but asked me to either sign on the trackpad with my finger (how do you make that not look like you had nerve damage?) or show a picture of my signature to the webcam of my Mac so it would do extraction on it (which didn’t work at all after 20 minutes of attempting, but also why can’t I just select a photo??). Finally I figured out pdfjs in Firefox recently shipped image-based signing (still waiting on certs)
Of course, I could have edited the PDF in a better editor (GIMP even!), but.. why is such seemingly simple and common PDF work a horror show?
I find Foxit Reader good for signing. You can also easily disable all the internet based "features" in the settings which I appreciate.
Edges pdf viewer lets you draw on pdf after which you can print to pdf.
I use that to sign with “image of my signature” style of signing.
I use that to sign with “image of my signature” style of signing.
If you want to add signatures, the best option is to use a PDF viewer that supports that directly (FoxIt Reader, for one). That saves the original PDF plus an annotation for the signature.
Second best is print using "Save as PDF". That saves the PDF as processed through the browser's PDF engine (PDFium, in the case of Chrome or Edge).
Worst choice is usually print using "Microsoft Print To PDF". That saves the PDF processed into a more generic way. Often the original text characters are replaced by drawings, and the final file size can be 10x what you expect.
Second best is print using "Save as PDF". That saves the PDF as processed through the browser's PDF engine (PDFium, in the case of Chrome or Edge).
Worst choice is usually print using "Microsoft Print To PDF". That saves the PDF processed into a more generic way. Often the original text characters are replaced by drawings, and the final file size can be 10x what you expect.
I guess you can't just use a photo because it would make it too easy to use someone else's signature
Acrobat is the worst. I had to download it to fill in tax forms and suddenly every pdf download triggers a lumbering beast to wake itself up and wrench control of my desktop. It has the feel of scammy shareware from back in the day.
Acrobat also installs this weird service that tries to upload all the pdf files you open, regardless of what you do, you cannot shut it down or disable.
I was in charge of the electronic document management system of a university, and kept having issues with deleting pdf files after opening them. The error said the files were still in use, and exiting Acrobat didn't solve the issue either. Apparently, the background service keeps the file open to upload it, and I had to forcefully close open files just to delete pdf files.
Acrobat is abusing a standard, portable document format, and trying to become synonymous with it, despite being very hostile against users.
I was in charge of the electronic document management system of a university, and kept having issues with deleting pdf files after opening them. The error said the files were still in use, and exiting Acrobat didn't solve the issue either. Apparently, the background service keeps the file open to upload it, and I had to forcefully close open files just to delete pdf files.
Acrobat is abusing a standard, portable document format, and trying to become synonymous with it, despite being very hostile against users.
> Acrobat is abusing a standard, portable document format, and trying to become synonymous with it, despite being very hostile against users
What? They're just extending the portability by uploading the files to the cloud so you can view them from anywhere! /s
I'm assuming/hoping that's all it is in whatever this uploading is. Did you find out why it was uploading files, and more importantly, where?
What? They're just extending the portability by uploading the files to the cloud so you can view them from anywhere! /s
I'm assuming/hoping that's all it is in whatever this uploading is. Did you find out why it was uploading files, and more importantly, where?
We didn't have the subscription, and there was no option to upload documents, or any information in the app preferences as to what was happening at all.
So, we couldn't find any information why it was happening, except after our complain and an update later, the background service started closing files when the Adobe app was exited.
We had tens of thousands of applicant documents, most of them contained personally identifiable information (PII) about future students, those files should not be even stored locally, except for the protected PII storage, yet along being uploaded to a random S3 bucket somewhere to be stolen by hackers.
If you're using Windows and have Adobe installed, just check your running programs and on top you'll see that weird Adobe service that you cannot disable even if you turn off its auto-start feature. Acrobat reader is supposed to be a PDF viewer, why does it even have a background service for f.ck sake.
So, we couldn't find any information why it was happening, except after our complain and an update later, the background service started closing files when the Adobe app was exited.
We had tens of thousands of applicant documents, most of them contained personally identifiable information (PII) about future students, those files should not be even stored locally, except for the protected PII storage, yet along being uploaded to a random S3 bucket somewhere to be stolen by hackers.
If you're using Windows and have Adobe installed, just check your running programs and on top you'll see that weird Adobe service that you cannot disable even if you turn off its auto-start feature. Acrobat reader is supposed to be a PDF viewer, why does it even have a background service for f.ck sake.
> Did you find out why it was uploading files, and more importantly, where?
Why ? PRISM. Where ? Who cares.
Why ? PRISM. Where ? Who cares.
Firefox has never failed me for this. It's great not needing a separate program at all.
Some tax forms like NY State fill-in forms have some scripted functionality that requires Adobe Acrobat to work, and they block rendering from other PDF programs. Even worse, once you've filled in the form, their PDF then blocks Acrobat from exporting to a normal PDF (the way you can save a print preview to a PDF for later) and so the only way you can get a real PDF of it is to print it directly and then scan it back to your computer.
stupidly does it block the Microsoft XPS printer?
I never had any problems with the Mac preview app before either, until these specific forms required something specifically from acrobat.
Preview.app is actually one of the few first-party Apple apps that I really miss when using a non-macOS computer.
that plus the quick look from smashing the space bar in Finder. selecting a file and hitting space is muscle memory for me, and the first time I do it on a non-macOS computer it just feels broken to me.
Microsoft PowerToys has this functionality, called Peek: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/peek
Is that something that comes built-in or installed?
To pile on wlesieutre's point, it's a separate app but should be part of every user install IMHO.
Keyboard manager for instance is plenty powerful while keeping a very simple interface, and will paliate the need for AutoHotKey for most people.
There's a flurry of other stuff that I guess Microsoft employees felt are tremendously helpful but couldn't convince management to bake into the system.
Keyboard manager for instance is plenty powerful while keeping a very simple interface, and will paliate the need for AutoHotKey for most people.
There's a flurry of other stuff that I guess Microsoft employees felt are tremendously helpful but couldn't convince management to bake into the system.
Installed, but includes a lot of other handy features and is highly recommended
you see my point though, right?
Being baked in or not is a tradeoff. In this case I'd say it would better if it was in, but having a one time download from a trusted source isn't the end of the world either.
I'd make the parallel with browsers: there's an argument for them to stay decoupled from the system.
I'd make the parallel with browsers: there's an argument for them to stay decoupled from the system.
I suspect being an optionally installable tool for power users gives their team more flexibility to make it a good product in an attempt to keep those users on Windows, if it had big user numbers they’d have to turn it into PowerToys 365 Copilot and make it so opening anything with the launcher tool somehow involved a round-trip through Edge and Bing
I'm sorry, but are you saying pressing the space bar is a power user move? Really? MS cannot include it, as that'd be admitting someone else came up with a better move. Having it as an installable option just says, yeah, it's cool, but only for those worthy. WTF? They just as easily could have had it be ctrl+windows+spacebar, and then it would be just a natural windows user shortcut. Maybe throw in +alt so that it's just smash all four bottom buttons in an angry move. even Apple didn't require it to be OpenApple+spacebar or ClosedApple+spacebar. It's just spacebar right out of the box. No secondary installs or buttons required.
I'm saying the features in PowerToys as a whole are. It includes weird things like a hotkey to crop a live thumbnail out of another window, or to force any window to float always on top, bring up a small thumbnail of all of your screens and click anywhere to teleport the mouse cursor.
Most people shouldn't have a hotkey to lock the active window on top of everything else. If they accidentally press it without knowing what they did, then they have a window stuck in the way and can't even get to The Google to ask it how to unstick it because they can't switch to their web browser window.
And yeah, there are also some features like Peek (the quick preview thing) that would make sense as being pulled out of PowerToys and included as native Windows features, but then they'd get fucked up by whoever is making all the godawful decisions about Windows development lately so I'm glad they haven't. If Peek were part of Windows they'd do something dumb like implement it as "Show this file in Edge" instead. Compared to PowerToys where apparently the developers have been tasked with making something good that people would want to use.
Most people shouldn't have a hotkey to lock the active window on top of everything else. If they accidentally press it without knowing what they did, then they have a window stuck in the way and can't even get to The Google to ask it how to unstick it because they can't switch to their web browser window.
And yeah, there are also some features like Peek (the quick preview thing) that would make sense as being pulled out of PowerToys and included as native Windows features, but then they'd get fucked up by whoever is making all the godawful decisions about Windows development lately so I'm glad they haven't. If Peek were part of Windows they'd do something dumb like implement it as "Show this file in Edge" instead. Compared to PowerToys where apparently the developers have been tasked with making something good that people would want to use.
Preview as someone who work in media production is borderline a must-have at this point. Fastest spot checks one could hope for.
The reason Preview works so well is because deep inside Apple's Quartz libraries used to render, rasterize and composite graphics such as windows, docs and images is a version of "Display PDF". Basically, PDF is a native macOS protocol.
The best of my understanding is that NeXT considered Display PDF the successor to Display PostScript and OS X inherited it. I have no idea how much or how little the latest macOS and iOS rely on PDF encoding for their GUIs now, but I know at one point it was an integral part of the windowing and drawing system and is still in there for processing PDF docs.
The best of my understanding is that NeXT considered Display PDF the successor to Display PostScript and OS X inherited it. I have no idea how much or how little the latest macOS and iOS rely on PDF encoding for their GUIs now, but I know at one point it was an integral part of the windowing and drawing system and is still in there for processing PDF docs.
It was never an integral part of the windowing system of either operating system. That idea never panned out. Quartz's drawing functions included what was needed for postscript, but the UI was done solely with bitmaps and cached bitmaps. There's PDF APIs in there, but they're not anything special, like being super fast, efficient, or hardware-accelerated.
Preview is genuinely very good, but it doesn’t handle annotations made in Acrobat very well. When navigating between annotations, they can become stuck open in Preview, and it is not possible to view insertions.
Whether that is the fault of Acrobat or Preview, I’m not sure. Unfortunately, though, it means I frequently need to move across to Acrobat when addressing edits that someone has marked up in that software. And that acts as a constant reminder of how sluggish, awkward and nagging Acrobat can be. Even quitting the app is slow!
Whether that is the fault of Acrobat or Preview, I’m not sure. Unfortunately, though, it means I frequently need to move across to Acrobat when addressing edits that someone has marked up in that software. And that acts as a constant reminder of how sluggish, awkward and nagging Acrobat can be. Even quitting the app is slow!
I came here to say how spoiled we are as Mac users. Preview is genuinely the best PDF reader. Full stop.
Unchallenged, and for something like 20 plus years running.
Unchallenged, and for something like 20 plus years running.
I’m convinced it is impossible to do better than Evince, I’ve never found any deficiency or lacking feature in the program.
But, if you think Preview is similarly perfect—maybe we should just come to the conclusion that PDF readers are in a pretty good state.
Which makes Acrobat so confusing.
But, if you think Preview is similarly perfect—maybe we should just come to the conclusion that PDF readers are in a pretty good state.
Which makes Acrobat so confusing.
> I’m convinced it is impossible to do better than Evince, I’ve never found any deficiency or lacking feature in the program.
For me, Evince fails to accurately show the physical paper size. Okular manages to do this just fine.
For me, Evince fails to accurately show the physical paper size. Okular manages to do this just fine.
Yeah, I've been very happy with it over the years. But my one minor nit-pick is that it uses a _lot_ of memory. I presume it is pre-rendering stuff for speed.
On iPhone and iPad I've been using Notability.
On iPhone and iPad I've been using Notability.
Interesting. I personally never liked Preview. No way to configure it to open maximized, so every time I open a Preview window, I have to maximize it manually.
But... why?
Anyway, you're on a Mac. Fix it yourself. Run the Shortcuts app and create a shortcut called something like "Maximize Preview". Set it to run an AppleScript:
Now in Shortcuts create an automation that runs when Preview is opened, and select that shortcut you just created as its action. You may have to go into System Settings > Privacy & Security > Accessibility and let Shortcuts and siriactionsd access to control your desktop.
Basically, you're doing something very uncommon for a Mac desktop, so it's not going to help you with that by default. It doesn't mean you're powerless to change it, though!
Anyway, you're on a Mac. Fix it yourself. Run the Shortcuts app and create a shortcut called something like "Maximize Preview". Set it to run an AppleScript:
on run {input, parameters}
tell application "Preview" to activate
tell application "System Events" to set value of attribute "AXFullScreen" of front window of (first process whose frontmost is true) to true
return input
end run
Now in Shortcuts create an automation that runs when Preview is opened, and select that shortcut you just created as its action. You may have to go into System Settings > Privacy & Security > Accessibility and let Shortcuts and siriactionsd access to control your desktop.
Basically, you're doing something very uncommon for a Mac desktop, so it's not going to help you with that by default. It doesn't mean you're powerless to change it, though!
Thanks. Will give that a try.
Did it work? I’m dying of curiosity!
I don't have a Mac: I've had Macs in the past and plan to get another soon.
My "will give that a try" means that I put a link to your comment on a to-do list.
My "will give that a try" means that I put a link to your comment on a to-do list.
I demand instant gratification, darn it!
Heh, gotcha. I do hope it helps, though! Shortcuts is astoundingly powerful and I’ve used it for any number of personal nits like this. For example, combine it with Keyboard Maestro and you can add new commands to any app that’s scriptable via Shortcuts, like “if the current app is Notes, and I press F5, copy the current note and post its contents to Mastodon”, or whatever.
Heh, gotcha. I do hope it helps, though! Shortcuts is astoundingly powerful and I’ve used it for any number of personal nits like this. For example, combine it with Keyboard Maestro and you can add new commands to any app that’s scriptable via Shortcuts, like “if the current app is Notes, and I press F5, copy the current note and post its contents to Mastodon”, or whatever.
Personally I think okular is better.
and now on iPad... finally
Acrobat Reader lets you do a lot of potentially bad things with ActiveScript in a PDF once the user allows it.
I worked on a PDF form that was distributed widely within a Gov department. It would be routinely saved locally and emailed half completed up the managerial chain for sign-off on the request.
It had a lot of dynamic fields so you had to allow it to run macros.
The first thing it did was check the version of the just opened form and replace it with the latest PDF from the department's server.
It also had save/resume functionality which would only work in Acrobat Reader at the time.
Edit: Shout out to Inkscape which I find is a handy replacement for Illustrator and doing minor fixes to PDFs.
I worked on a PDF form that was distributed widely within a Gov department. It would be routinely saved locally and emailed half completed up the managerial chain for sign-off on the request.
It had a lot of dynamic fields so you had to allow it to run macros.
The first thing it did was check the version of the just opened form and replace it with the latest PDF from the department's server.
It also had save/resume functionality which would only work in Acrobat Reader at the time.
Edit: Shout out to Inkscape which I find is a handy replacement for Illustrator and doing minor fixes to PDFs.
There are a surprising number of Preview defenders here. You guys must have never had to open a 500+ page document, because for me, that's an all-but guaranteed way to make Preview crash. Preview is only best because the major alternatives (Acrobat) suck more.
PDF readers I actually like: Zathura (obviously), sioyek (if you like customizability and Vim-like bindings, this is a good one!), and Skim.
Everything else tries to do too much (read: be an Acrobat substitute).
PDF readers I actually like: Zathura (obviously), sioyek (if you like customizability and Vim-like bindings, this is a good one!), and Skim.
Everything else tries to do too much (read: be an Acrobat substitute).
I used preview to annotate pdf for copyediting. It was modest 100 page text only doc. After about 70 pages or so preview crashed and the file became corrupted with no way to recover the annotation or comments. Never used preview for annotation there after. But as a viewer is good
Skim is amazing, I've never had it crash on large documents or with keyword searches as Preview almost always does. Also has a great note-taking system for scientific / academic work. Not sure why it flies under the radar so much.
I’ve had Skim crash on me several times. I still like it though.
I haven't had it crash. Typically my documents are under a 300 pages (either academic books or papers), but occasionally I use the PDF reference, which is 1300 pages.
For me the default alternative to Preview is PDF Expert. It's very zippy and it has the quality of life stuff that other readers leave out, like editing bookmarks.
I haven't really ever had issues with Evince. I don't know that my requirements have that advanced, but it does auto-updates when I write Typst or LaTeX, which is the thing I primarily care about.
From a quick glance it seems to be a GNOME application? So that would rule out Windows support right?
Oh, probably. The post mentioned Wayland which is why I brought it up.
I haven’t run windows in any serious capacity in quite some time.
I haven’t run windows in any serious capacity in quite some time.
Apple Preview does mostly everything you could want to do with a PDF. Supports unlocking encrypted PDFs, form filling, and even page rotation. (A feature which Adobe charges for.)
As a GNU / Linux Debian user, I personally use many different PDF readers for eccentric reasons lol!
My preference by far is qpdfview, but I also use Okular (KDE), Evince, its fork for MATE desktop environment, Atril, and of course xpdf!
My preference by far is qpdfview, but I also use Okular (KDE), Evince, its fork for MATE desktop environment, Atril, and of course xpdf!
In my experience, the best tool to edit PDFs is Master PDF Editor. The older version 4 is even freely available in the arch user repository: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/masterpdfeditor-free
And commercial version is not that expensive considering how good it is.
My company provides me with the top tier license for Bluebeam Revu, an amazing PDF editor geared towards the construction industry. It handles everything you can think of flawlessly, it can extract PDF tables into Excel spreadsheets, markups of all kinds, measuring, counting, resizing; adding, removing extracting, and collating sheets, pasting in photos from the clipboard, and so much more. It’s the best piece of software I use at work, and I’m thankful for it every day.
The construction industry is very strange and mostly runs on emailed PDFs (plans, proposals, submittals, etc) and Excel spreadsheets. Sometimes these PDFs are organized in Procore.
The construction industry is very strange and mostly runs on emailed PDFs (plans, proposals, submittals, etc) and Excel spreadsheets. Sometimes these PDFs are organized in Procore.
We all do. There are many amazing alternatives nowadays. No need for any Adobe products.
PDF is no longer a single format. You have to specify what type of PDF. Many will not open in anything but Acrobat.
For example the Wisconsin state dept. of natural resources converted nearly all of their permit/form PDFs to "Dynamic XFA (XML Form Architecture) PDF". Which is basically a PDF without content that pulls down all it's content from the web. It even still, ostensibly, supports Flash (swf) animations. But when I try to open those permit form PDFs in any other viewer but Acrobat I get,
>"Please wait... If this message is not eventually replaced by the proper contents of the document, your PDF viewer may not be able to display this type of document. You can upgrade to the latest version of Adobe Reader for Windows®, Mac, or Linux® by visiting http://www.adobe.com/go/reader_download. For more assistance with Adobe Reader visit http://www.adobe.com/go/acrreader. Windows is either a registered trademark or a trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. Mac is a trademark of Apple Inc., registered in the United States and other countries. Linux is the registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in the U.S. and other countries." - https://dnr.wi.gov/files/PDF/forms/9400/9400-280.pdf
PDF is supposed to be the format that looks the same everywhere all the time. But these "PDF" completely and miserably fail at that.
For example the Wisconsin state dept. of natural resources converted nearly all of their permit/form PDFs to "Dynamic XFA (XML Form Architecture) PDF". Which is basically a PDF without content that pulls down all it's content from the web. It even still, ostensibly, supports Flash (swf) animations. But when I try to open those permit form PDFs in any other viewer but Acrobat I get,
>"Please wait... If this message is not eventually replaced by the proper contents of the document, your PDF viewer may not be able to display this type of document. You can upgrade to the latest version of Adobe Reader for Windows®, Mac, or Linux® by visiting http://www.adobe.com/go/reader_download. For more assistance with Adobe Reader visit http://www.adobe.com/go/acrreader. Windows is either a registered trademark or a trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. Mac is a trademark of Apple Inc., registered in the United States and other countries. Linux is the registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in the U.S. and other countries." - https://dnr.wi.gov/files/PDF/forms/9400/9400-280.pdf
PDF is supposed to be the format that looks the same everywhere all the time. But these "PDF" completely and miserably fail at that.
Thank you for giving the specific name ("Dynamic XFA (XML Form Architecture)") to the kind of PDF that generates the "Please wait" message. I have seen this and never understood how it arises. Chuck Geschke spins in his grave ...
Indeed, the "Chuck Geschke spinning in his grave" animation wouldn't have been possible without Flash support!
That would be one of the reasons I’d have a dedicated computer that I power on for these kinds of things. Better than suffer bad software all the times.
>Which is basically a PDF without content that pulls down all its content from the web.
…why?
Isn’t that literally a website at this point? What benefit can you possibly have over a link ?
…why?
Isn’t that literally a website at this point? What benefit can you possibly have over a link ?
Adobe gets to charge somebody a big bag of money.
If the form has to download web content then it should just be a web form. Like, what are we doing here guys.
I share the same OP sentiment, and I think most users are.
At my workplace I've most of the Acrobat software suites for free but cannot be bothered to install them no matter how useful for my workflow because their multitude of software are just bad and resource hungry.
This is a classic pain point, I'm surprised Microsoft or any other companies do not provide better alternative to popular Acrobat software. My take is that designing front-end desktop software are genuinely hard and pay little if you're the second players.
At my workplace I've most of the Acrobat software suites for free but cannot be bothered to install them no matter how useful for my workflow because their multitude of software are just bad and resource hungry.
This is a classic pain point, I'm surprised Microsoft or any other companies do not provide better alternative to popular Acrobat software. My take is that designing front-end desktop software are genuinely hard and pay little if you're the second players.
Pretty neat, I always appreciate it when someone can give the reasoning behind their programming choices.
Its a good start but some issues (on Win10 using the binary from releases) that became pretty apparent right off the bat. I took an instructables page[1], that on Windows I had used 'print to PDF' to print it from Firefox into one long PDF. Using 'j' to scroll down, stops at the end of the page but keeps pretending its going down so you end up down a bunch of virtual lines that don't exist, 'J' will move you to the next page but not to the top of the next page? Two copies of the same file (but from different places, one from the NAS and one from the local disk) open, then neither one of them rendered. The status line suggested they were on different pages but there was nothing on the screen.
That said, it started quickly and time to first page render was fast (with a single file open). I tried it on a more conventional file (datasheet) and again with 'j' or 'k' it moves the page down or up and leave blank space where the page was, neither the next or previous pages are anywhere to be seen until you type 'J' or 'K'. That's a bit unintuitive.
[1] https://www.instructables.com/HackerBox-0110-Synth/
Its a good start but some issues (on Win10 using the binary from releases) that became pretty apparent right off the bat. I took an instructables page[1], that on Windows I had used 'print to PDF' to print it from Firefox into one long PDF. Using 'j' to scroll down, stops at the end of the page but keeps pretending its going down so you end up down a bunch of virtual lines that don't exist, 'J' will move you to the next page but not to the top of the next page? Two copies of the same file (but from different places, one from the NAS and one from the local disk) open, then neither one of them rendered. The status line suggested they were on different pages but there was nothing on the screen.
That said, it started quickly and time to first page render was fast (with a single file open). I tried it on a more conventional file (datasheet) and again with 'j' or 'k' it moves the page down or up and leave blank space where the page was, neither the next or previous pages are anywhere to be seen until you type 'J' or 'K'. That's a bit unintuitive.
[1] https://www.instructables.com/HackerBox-0110-Synth/
I use the free version of PDF Expert on all my Apple devices, and it's pretty great. (I use it for heavy-duty highlighting and annotation, document creation/merging, creation of tables of contents, as well as handling large pdfs — appellate case records, briefs, etc.) I'm especially fond of how it works on my enormous iPad Pro with the Apple Pencil: almost as good as, and in many ways better than, working with real paper and pencil.
No mention of Okular from KDE.
I vote for it too. My favorite features are adding comments to highlights when reviewing a PDF and the tool to copy tables to clipboard that allows you to help it with the segmentation. I even got some of my colleagues that are on Windows into it, and I don't even use KDE Plasma as my DE.
I installed it a while ago based on recommendations I saw here. It works far better than Acrobat ever did. Deleting all of the Adobe files off of my computer felt great.
How about the fact they charge $25/mo for acrobat
What are people using as a free (edit: or lifetime license) PDF editor for business use / non-technical people? Whenever we try anything else we inevitably run into something we need acrobat for.
Acrobat 9.0
I can’t legally buy that anymore and I’d need to downgrade OS to use it anyways?
It runs on windows 11
https://www.ebay.com/itm/144554666031?_skw=adobe+acrobat+9+p...
https://www.ebay.com/itm/144554666031?_skw=adobe+acrobat+9+p...
I have grok produce a precise transcription of the text, then have chatgpt produce an editable word document, including forms, following the text that grok picked up (it's a lot better at OCR, for some reason)
And then if I need to produce another pdf, I export it from Word.
PDFs are silly. It's tech superstition, kinda like the belief that faxes are secure.
And then if I need to produce another pdf, I export it from Word.
PDFs are silly. It's tech superstition, kinda like the belief that faxes are secure.
We have to manipulate 100 page PDFs, that sounds like a nightmare.
I also can’t run sensitive docs through LLMs. This stuff has to stay local.
I also can’t run sensitive docs through LLMs. This stuff has to stay local.
Not sure why would anyone edit a pdf. To me this is a format you export to, not a draft/working doc format.
Reorder pages. Redact. Need to make a minor change, and don't have the original. Digitally sign a document. Comment on a document. Join several documents together.
There are a bunch of reasons.
There are a bunch of reasons.
Reordering pages is easily done with the print system of your operating system.
I don't count signing as editing really as the structure and content do not change, you sre just attaching s certificate. Th spanish government offer/maintain an open source java tool to digitally sign pdfs: https://administracionelectronica.gob.es/ctt/clienteafirma https://github.com/ctt-gob-es/clienteafirma/
I've also copy pasted scan of my signature on contracts using Gimp in order to not have to print them, it is fairly easy.
For the rest I would tend to ask first for thread original working document if I don't have it already. Having said that I have edited in a hurry an old cv for my partner using libreoffice draw in the past.
I don't count signing as editing really as the structure and content do not change, you sre just attaching s certificate. Th spanish government offer/maintain an open source java tool to digitally sign pdfs: https://administracionelectronica.gob.es/ctt/clienteafirma https://github.com/ctt-gob-es/clienteafirma/
I've also copy pasted scan of my signature on contracts using Gimp in order to not have to print them, it is fairly easy.
For the rest I would tend to ask first for thread original working document if I don't have it already. Having said that I have edited in a hurry an old cv for my partner using libreoffice draw in the past.
Thank you.
I am constantly mind blown by the lack of awareness around PDF use in business on this board (and O365) lol.
I am constantly mind blown by the lack of awareness around PDF use in business on this board (and O365) lol.
Maybe people gere are more picky whom they are doing business with. I mean if I have to sign a contract I'd rather do it with someone who tend to know what they are doing on a general basis.
Sorry you’re saying someone who uses PDFs is not someone you’ll do business with?
As much as I agree, I've lost track of how often someone's given me a PDF form to fill out. While driving down to the print store during business hours for a scanner is possible, it's a lot easier to make a sacrifice to the dark gods of format abuse instead.
Well I don't really count "filling out a form" as editing as you don't really change the structure, just add stuff in the blanks and any reader such as the one on yoir browser can do it.
I spend a lot of time using pdf’s at work as well and I’ve often yearned for something that uses vim keyboard commands and allows some keyboard based tagging and also search functionality. I explored writing something, but my understanding is that muPDF is proprietary and not suitable for commercial use in many cases.
When I was researching building a third party pdf reader with super specialized functions, I found that pdf.js might be good alternative that could be used commercially.
When I was researching building a third party pdf reader with super specialized functions, I found that pdf.js might be good alternative that could be used commercially.
There is a pure rust library for rendering pdfs to png(or bitmap) and svg: https://github.com/LaurenzV/hayro. It is used by typst for pdf image[1]. Although it might not be as mature as mupdf.
[1]: https://github.com/typst/typst/pull/6623
[1]: https://github.com/typst/typst/pull/6623
You right! It's been over a year since I evaluated hayro and sadly the performance wasn't good enough yet for a 60 fps render.
I actually chatted for a bit with Laurenz (the developer) and he recommended against using hayro in my case for the time being.
It is however part of (or dependent on) the larger linebender group of crates and will most likely be the best option in the future.
I actually chatted for a bit with Laurenz (the developer) and he recommended against using hayro in my case for the time being.
It is however part of (or dependent on) the larger linebender group of crates and will most likely be the best option in the future.
Thank you for the information!
For editing PDF content on Windows, "PDF-XChange Editor" (formerly PDF-XChange Viewer) can be pretty useful:
https://www.pdf-xchange.com/product/pdf-xchange-editor
There is a free version available during install (not immediately clear from the website), which already can do some things most free PDF viewers can't, like editing text.
https://www.pdf-xchange.com/product/pdf-xchange-editor
There is a free version available during install (not immediately clear from the website), which already can do some things most free PDF viewers can't, like editing text.
I want to add in, as I used a ton of JS back when for a GUI that would build prepress ready PDFs and ship em direct to giant xerox printers for a company called Copy General - the early days of on demand printing.
The pdf format was awesome broad shift for the early digital printers and has been a nice standard for a long time.
Adobe uses Acrobat as leverage in this game. Reader is the public’s only peephole and they have famously kept the features lean.
The pdf format was awesome broad shift for the early digital printers and has been a nice standard for a long time.
Adobe uses Acrobat as leverage in this game. Reader is the public’s only peephole and they have famously kept the features lean.
I didn't even knew acrobat was still a thing. I thought it died at the same time as flash. Who is still using it and what would be the use case?
I hate pretty much everything from Adobe. I treat all their software as malware since it's counter intuitive and consumes too much resources. Thank God i'm not an artist/design who has to work with their products daily.
And even if you were you could manage to earn a living without using Adobe stuff. Ask David Revoy, for example.
https://www.davidrevoy.com/static2/about-me
https://www.davidrevoy.com/static2/about-me
I still use Acrobat for two things:
- Viewing Altium generated schematics, which have some macros that only work in Acrobat.
- Printing stuff. Acrobat print dialog is pretty good.
- Viewing Altium generated schematics, which have some macros that only work in Acrobat.
- Printing stuff. Acrobat print dialog is pretty good.
Adobe is trash, bloated, over-priced software that is mostly DRM. Paying customer? Adobe hates you, but not your money.
Like a lot of enterprise software companies - their customers aren't their end users so a lot of their incentives aren't actually aligned to produce a good UX.
What’s crazy about how janky and slow Acrobat is that pdf-tools in Emacs is much faster, including at live resizing a PDF along with an emacs frame, even though Emacs has no PDF support. (PDF tools calls out to an external process to render individual pages to images, which emacs is capable of displaying.)
> pdf-tools in Emacs is much faster
pdf-tools is quite slow and a memory hog. emacs-reader is a replacement for it (still in development) that already blows every PDF reader I've ever used out of the water in performance:
https://tv.dyne.org/w/wcedffVATJGwLSCqta6pk1
pdf-tools is quite slow and a memory hog. emacs-reader is a replacement for it (still in development) that already blows every PDF reader I've ever used out of the water in performance:
https://tv.dyne.org/w/wcedffVATJGwLSCqta6pk1
The other day I had to use Acrobat at work and was absolutely flabbergasted by the UI. I counted no fewer than six buttons for the AI assistant but couldn't figure out how to see chapters for the document I was reading.
What I hate about Preview on macOS is that all opened PDFs are kept in memory as opposed to freeing up the memory when the PDF is not active.
Look I know that I probably should not have 200 PDFs open, but Preview should not be consuming 40GB of memory.
Look I know that I probably should not have 200 PDFs open, but Preview should not be consuming 40GB of memory.
That's... not how programs usually work. You open something, it's in memory.
Yeah, you shouldn't have 200 PDFs open.
On the other hand, the good news is your Mac still runs fine, consuming 40GB of "memory" even if you've only got 8GB. Since it's just putting it all out to swap on a fast SSD. So why even complain?
Yeah, you shouldn't have 200 PDFs open.
On the other hand, the good news is your Mac still runs fine, consuming 40GB of "memory" even if you've only got 8GB. Since it's just putting it all out to swap on a fast SSD. So why even complain?
> That's... not how programs usually work. You open something, it's in memory.
What are you talking about? UPDF does it just fine https://updf.com/updf-mac-user-guide/preferences-mac/#3
> Yeah, you shouldn't have 200 PDFs open.
Nah.
> On the other hand, the good news is your Mac still runs fine, consuming 40GB of "memory" even if you've only got 8GB. Since it's just putting it all out to swap on a fast SSD. So why even complain?
I'm aware, however it only works like this in theory. In practice, if the Preview gets to like 60GB, the whole system will get slow until I close it.
What are you talking about? UPDF does it just fine https://updf.com/updf-mac-user-guide/preferences-mac/#3
> Yeah, you shouldn't have 200 PDFs open.
Nah.
> On the other hand, the good news is your Mac still runs fine, consuming 40GB of "memory" even if you've only got 8GB. Since it's just putting it all out to swap on a fast SSD. So why even complain?
I'm aware, however it only works like this in theory. In practice, if the Preview gets to like 60GB, the whole system will get slow until I close it.
As someone who routinely switches between multi-gigabyte PDF files, I appreciate that they all stay loaded in memory. Ain't nobody got time to re-render and re-index those files every time I switch documents..
Ok, it should be an option.
Wait until it's doing OCR on your 200 open PDF files...
Takes a while to finish, with the CPU going into overdrive.
But hey, it's useful when you want to Cmd-F through a bunch of scanned pixels.
:-)
Takes a while to finish, with the CPU going into overdrive.
But hey, it's useful when you want to Cmd-F through a bunch of scanned pixels.
:-)
I recommend sioyek if you need some highlighting functionality which is absent in zathura. Moreover, Xournal++ is also pretty good for editing.
What I really want is a PDF editor, with just highlighting functionality, that works like the visual mode.
What I really want is a PDF editor, with just highlighting functionality, that works like the visual mode.
Edge is a decent pdf viewer, somehow adobe managed to make soemthing worse than edge
Chrome uses the open source PDFium engine to render PDFs. That should let anyone view and use 99% of PDFs
https://pdfium.googlesource.com/pdfium
https://pdfium.googlesource.com/pdfium
Is there any open way to:
- make fillable forms
- fill out a form, and save/load/save it?
I recall some fillable forms could be opened and filled out on macos, but then they were sort of "finalized" and couldn't be edited once saved.
- make fillable forms
- fill out a form, and save/load/save it?
I recall some fillable forms could be opened and filled out on macos, but then they were sort of "finalized" and couldn't be edited once saved.
Not yet, and maybe not ever.
MuPDF for sure has most of the capabilities of interacting with forms. But for my workflow I mostly create and read pdfs, I don't fill out much information in partially complete PDFs.
Comments or annotations are in the planning stage though
MuPDF for sure has most of the capabilities of interacting with forms. But for my workflow I mostly create and read pdfs, I don't fill out much information in partially complete PDFs.
Comments or annotations are in the planning stage though
you forgot the adoption of enterprise software is determined not by employees, but by the VP of IT which Adobe probably does an excellent job of “customer relationship” with.
>which Adobe probably does an excellent job of “customer relationship” with
It really depends. We have a good CSM. But s/he has to defer to CSM's on other teams for more specialized knowledge. Any problems there have been far, far down my list of issues with that company.
Adobe's leverage is big, especially in creative industries so they can keep coasting.
It really depends. We have a good CSM. But s/he has to defer to CSM's on other teams for more specialized knowledge. Any problems there have been far, far down my list of issues with that company.
Adobe's leverage is big, especially in creative industries so they can keep coasting.
In my experience, anyone running Wayland is very much used to some number of applications that depend on Xwayland. Does Zathura + MuPDF not work with it?
Either way, if you want to show off a project, just do so…
Either way, if you want to show off a project, just do so…
Of course Zathura + any backend works through XWayland. But as mentioned I also use Windows and want to use the same program (or something with the same key bindings) on both operating systems
Yeah, it works perfectly fine for me on hyprland.
Despite trying many alternatives, I still regularly receive PDFs that can only be opened or signed in Acrobat. (Not sure how those are being created bu there's some lock-in there.)
One of the first things I do on family computers is set PDFs to open in Chrome. (If I have time and the authority I also remove Acrobat.) It's saved me a lot of hassle.
Running X11 on WSL is pretty easy and pain-free these days. The author could hypothetically run Zathura through that setup in a pinch.
I'm all for a good Acrobat alternative though.
I'm all for a good Acrobat alternative though.
I'm pretty sure zathura works with wayland just fine.
Of course Zathura + any backend works through XWayland. But as mentioned I also use Windows and want to use the same program (or something with the same key bindings) on both operating systems
Very sweet project, it basically feels like mpv[1] for pdf.
[1]: https://mpv.io
[1]: https://mpv.io
Okular, KDE's PDF viewer, works on Windows/MacOS as well, and is most tolerable.
Writing a good pdf writer is easy. Writing a good pdf reader is extremely difficult.
[deleted]
If Zathura works on X11 wouldn't it work with Xwayland?
Of course Zathura + any backend works through XWayland. But as mentioned I also use Windows and want to use the same program (or something with the same key bindings) on both operating systems
Ah, missed that bit.
This seems pretty far to go to do it but I think you could probably get it working on Windows through WSL2.
This seems pretty far to go to do it but I think you could probably get it working on Windows through WSL2.
I just uninstalled it, and ditched it for something else.
I would never infect my computer with any Adobe spyware.
One of my favorite things about macOS is that it comes with Preview. It's clean and lightning-fast for viewing and annotating PDFs. PDF support feels like it's just part of the OS because, well, it is.
I guess I hate Acrobat too, but I virtually never have to use it (except for tax forms, ugh).
I guess I hate Acrobat too, but I virtually never have to use it (except for tax forms, ugh).
I'm a simple man. I see iced, I upvote
Just use sumatraPDF. Works on wine.
Acrobat is malware.
> On linux there is (at least) one non-bad PDF reader. Zathura is amazing with the MuPDF backend.
Obviously, Linux has the showstopper of being a non-abusive, non-proprietary software platform.
Who needs that nonsense, when the problem we're trying to solve is abusive, proprietary software.
Obviously, Linux has the showstopper of being a non-abusive, non-proprietary software platform.
Who needs that nonsense, when the problem we're trying to solve is abusive, proprietary software.