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It's scary how such a widely used format (PDF) is almost in full control by Adobe. I have yet to see a true competitor to Adobe Acrobat. The only one that has c
by Alifatisk 3y ago
It's scary how such a widely used format (PDF) is almost in full control by Adobe. I have yet to see a true competitor to Adobe Acrobat. The only one that has come really close is the one that comes built-in for macOS. It's a hidden gem.
- philsnow 3y agoDoes that one have a name? I’m a MacOS transplant and have never gotten terribly familiar with the territory. Thanks!
- tonyedgecombe 3y agoPreview is the app on macOS that lets you view and even edit PDF files.
- jwong_ 3y agopreview.app
- cmdrriker 3y agoPreview.app which owes its heritage to NextStep. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preview https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preview
- philsnow 3y ago... ah, thanks, I misread. I thought GP was talking about a document format in the same space as PDF that was native to MacOS.
- bla3 3y agoPDF had an open spec and oodles of programs supporting it. I don't understand where this comment is coming from.
- webel0 3y agoAdobe acrobat (and maybe reader) is really the only app that fully supports the full PDF spec as understood by the authors of the spec. There are ridiculous parts of the spec that allow support for things like JS, etc.
- cmrx64 3y agoI don’t think it’s ridiculous to want a scriptable document, especially for complicated forms. Likewise for the other much-dragged features for 3d scenes. https://pdfa.org/resource/pdf-in-manufacturing/ https://pdfa.org/resource/pdf-in-manufacturing/ is a great usecase.
- fuzztester 3y agoThe PDF spec even supports attachments in PDF files.
- rudasn 3y agoHow does that work exactly? Is it widely supported? I recently had to add an embed feature to our pdf rendering, to allow users to embed other pdfs inside the one we generate for them. Since we use headless Chrome, I used pdfjs from mozilla to render the embedded pdf on screen before generating the pdf, so you can actually see and read the embedded pdf. Works pretty well, but was wondering about this attachment feature of pdfs.
- cmrx64 3y agoPDF is a container format and yoy can just shove files in there. pdftk supports this with attach_files, and at the very least the linux pdf readers I’ve used know how to deal with them.
- rudasn 3y agoTIL! Since these pdfs end up in whatever and how old devices, I'd rather not risk it though.
- asdfologist 3y agoI find Chrome's built-in PDF viewer much snappier than Adobe Acrobat.
- noAnswer 3y agoSadly I had to install Adobe Reader on my father PC again after he had documents* with formulas. Chrome would calculate the numbers wrong. Everything was off by 10. *To get reimburses from a union or something.
- asdfologist 3y agoWhoa, I had no idea PDFs can have formulas.
- SturgeonsLaw 3y agoYou can embed Javascript in PDFs
- fuzztester 3y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38768892 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38768892
- aragonite 3y agoIf you occasionally need Adobe Reader/Acrobat exclusive features but don't want to install, you can use the free online version of Acrobat. It's pretty decent though it doesn't have all the features: https://acrobat.adobe.com/us/en/ https://acrobat.adobe.com/us/en/
- manmal 3y agoI recently had issues with macOS‘ Preview.app and formulas. It’s a nice feature, but probably not widely supported.
- rmbyrro 3y agoFoxit Phantom is pretty good
- Alifatisk 3y agoIt costs, I might aswell pay for Acrobat.
- wolverine876 3y agoWhat if Foxit works better and costs less?
- Alifatisk 3y agoThat’d be interesting but I’m not the right audience. In which ways is it better than Acrobat?
- wolverine876 3y agoIME: Much faster, far better UI. (Foxit is one option of many.)
- pmarreck 3y agoIt’s incredible to me that not only has Preview.app been the best non-Adobe way to use PDF’s for decades now and only on macOS (perhaps because NextStep, its roots, used PostScript natively?) but that Linux actually also seems to have better tooling in this space than Windows (where you’re pretty much stuck with Adobe Reader if you want a free solution)
- wolverine876 3y ago> Preview.app been the best non-Adobe way to use PDF’s for decades now Where is all this stuff coming from? Why would you say Preview is the best? Foxit? Nitro? Their are endless PDF applications much more powerful and capable, some designed for professionals.
- ornornor 3y agoFor annotating and adding a hand drawn signature to PDFs, preview really is the best: lightweight, straightforward, free, comes with the OS. I don’t know any comparable app for Linux (or windows although I rarely use it)
- nip 3y agohttps://simplePDF.eu https://simplePDF.eu will be the closest « Preview-like » experience on Linux (and any OS really). It’s local only (the document you load and data you fill in never leave the browser) and free Disclosure: I’m the developer behind it
- Alifatisk 3y agoAny plans on implementing redaction?
- nip 3y agoIf the background is white, it’s already possible: https://simplepdf.eu/help/faq/how-to-add-background https://simplepdf.eu/help/faq/how-to-add-background For other colors, it’s in the backlog! (I’d aiming to automatically provide the correct color by inspecting pixels within the area to redact, to make it as simple as possible)
- whatisyour 3y agoWhat about Okular?
- Alifatisk 3y agoThere is no support for redacting text properly on Okular.
- hyperthesis 3y agoAdobe is expert at software standards. They aren't compulsive about control, yet don't give the farm away. The know when to be open and how much. That is how they dominate.
- wolverine876 3y agoCould you give an example? PDF is an open standard controlled by ISO and has been for awhile.
- Loggias 3y ago[dead]
- simondotau 3y agoPDF has been a free-as-in-beer standard since 1993 and a free-as-in-speech ISO standard since 2008. The reality is that PDF is open, reliable, useful, feature rich, and widely accepted. It has no serious competitors. There's a reason why, unlike raster image formats, there aren't any serious competitors. The thing to realise about printed page file formats is that even if you set aside all of the silly "multimedia" and "interactivity" features, there's still a gargantuan rabbit hole of non-trivial features that need to be implemented absolutely perfectly, from kerning to spot color. PDF does it all very well. There's really no scope for a competitor to come along to make something that's obviously better.
- fuzztester 3y ago>PDF has been a free-as-in-beer standard since 1993 and a free-as-in-speech ISO standard since 2008. Yes. The first sentence of the Wikipedia article about PDF is: >Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. And the last sentence of the first paragraph of the same article is: >PDF was standardized as ISO 32000 in 2008.[5] The last edition as ISO 32000-2:2020 was published in December 2020. .
- izacus 3y agoEspecially since there's a PDF/A standard subset for archival, which makes those documents readable decades after any other format would rot.
- throwaway2037 3y ago> PDF/A standard Yes, the United States Library of Congress makes heavy use. I imagine their evaluation process to select a digital archive format is very tough!
- anon373839 3y agoWarning: Preview has a very, very nasty PDF-damaging bug. After applying a signature to a PDF in Preview, the searchable text layer becomes scrambled so that numbers are no longer searchable or copy-able. For example, “$745.25” would become something like “$;@€:-€“. The document would still look correct, but you could not search for that figure or copy it out of the PDF without instead getting the garbled version.
- niutech 3y agoThere are two open competitive formats to PDF: - OpenXPS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_XML_Paper_Specification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_XML_Paper_Specification) - EPS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encapsulated_PostScript https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encapsulated_PostScript).