7 ms·

Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable

193 points by vincent-uden 1y ago

Scene_Cast2 1y ago
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.
clickety_clack 1y ago
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.
- gdulli 1y ago
  Firefox has never failed me for this. It's great not needing a separate program at all.
  - clickety_clack 1y ago
    I never had any problems with the Mac preview app before either, until these specific forms required something specifically from acrobat.
  - noahmasur 1y ago
    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.
    - Benanov 1y ago
      stupidly does it block the Microsoft XPS printer?
- itopaloglu83 1y ago
  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.
  - dylan604 1y ago
    > 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?
    - itopaloglu83 1y ago
      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.
    - hulitu 1y ago
      > Did you find out why it was uploading files, and more importantly, where? Why ? PRISM. Where ? Who cares.
elorant 1y ago
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.
- Gualdrapo 1y ago
  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
mananaysiempre 1y ago
No mention of Sumatra PDF[1]? Windows (only), open source, uses MuPDF. [1] https://www.sumatrapdfreader.org/ https://www.sumatrapdfreader.org/
- zamadatix 1y ago
  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!
- globalnode 1y ago
  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.
  - Muromec 1y ago
    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.
    - techjamie 1y ago
      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.
      - mananaysiempre 1y ago
        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.)
- 1y ago
porphyra 1y ago
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 https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/masterpdfeditor-free
- sigsergv 1y ago
  And commercial version is not that expensive considering how good it is.
karsa_orlong 1y ago
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.
adamnemecek 1y ago
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.
- 243524352435 1y ago
  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. :-)
- crazygringo 1y ago
  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?
  - adamnemecek 1y ago
    > 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 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.
- seemaze 1y ago
  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..
asdff 1y ago
How about the fact they charge $25/mo for acrobat
annoyingnoob 1y ago
Adobe is trash, bloated, over-priced software that is mostly DRM. Paying customer? Adobe hates you, but not your money.
- munk-a 1y ago
  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.
gdevenyi 1y ago
No mention of Okular from KDE.
- lurk2 1y ago
  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.
- jwrallie 1y ago
  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.
nipperkinfeet 1y ago
We all do. There are many amazing alternatives nowadays. No need for any Adobe products.
- superkuh 1y ago
  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 http://www.adobe.com/go/reader_download. For more assistance with Adobe Reader visit http://www.adobe.com/go/acrreader 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 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.
  - glkindlmann 1y ago
    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 ...
    - GuB-42 1y ago
      Indeed, the "Chuck Geschke spinning in his grave" animation wouldn't have been possible without Flash support!
LeoPanthera 1y ago
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.)
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
OGEnthusiast 1y ago
Preview.app is actually one of the few first-party Apple apps that I really miss when using a non-macOS computer.
- benjaminclauss 1y ago
  and now on iPad... finally
- dylan604 1y ago
  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.
  - Forgeties79 1y ago
    Preview as someone who work in media production is borderline a must-have at this point. Fastest spot checks one could hope for.
  - kennyadam 1y ago
    Microsoft PowerToys has this functionality, called Peek: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/peek https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/peek
    - dylan604 1y ago
      Is that something that comes built-in or installed?
      - wlesieutre 1y ago
        Installed, but includes a lot of other handy features and is highly recommended
        dylan604 1y ago
treetalker 1y ago
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.
neilv 1y ago
> 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.
bix6 1y ago
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.
- observationist 1y ago
  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.
  - bix6 1y ago
    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.
- cyanydeez 1y ago
  Acrobat 9.0
  - bix6 1y ago
    I can’t legally buy that anymore and I’d need to downgrade OS to use it anyways?
    - cyanydeez 1y ago
      It runs on windows 11 https://www.ebay.com/itm/144554666031?_skw=adobe+acrobat+9+pro&itmmeta=01K7S136S6DN6NPZS907VMD9F8&hash=item21a821282f%3Ag%3ASKoAAOSwc%7E9kLIMu&itmprp=enc%3AAQAKAAAA0FkggFvd1GGDu0w3yXCmi1eOBHWVm45rH2aCYh6C4RjfvikxuUPrkxXBUDII0PGgRZtR0YtAJM9FJQkXqPN8G22ZQz9vJdlvarOgdei%2Fy5dpHyNho3b60IzOqpuqyl2JsxLucfxbHeTet1nI%2Ftc%2B%2BOj3I580QXsdgYQTuwKLxW7toPq19KztQRj4KyBpX1Q0UA6BULX1jKofCzy7LOV8AVoaEksYv420CFrkAecLeNe1PZMuRgYalomK7ZIPb0utXZQ2QMMYPoxHqU5JyIkTo30%3D%7Ctkp%3ABlBMUNjsjKG-Zg&keyword=adobe+acrobat+9+pro&sacat=0&relatedSearch=true https://www.ebay.com/itm/144554666031?_skw=adobe+acrobat+9+p...
crazygringo 1y ago
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).
stefanos82 1y ago
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!
diegof79 1y ago
Preview is probably the best thing that has happened since I switched to Mac almost two decades ago.
- seemaze 1y ago
  Hardest working app on macOS
quickthrowman 1y ago
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.
tombert 1y ago
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.
- vincent-uden 1y ago
  From a quick glance it seems to be a GNOME application? So that would rule out Windows support right?
  - tombert 1y ago
    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.
juliangmp 1y ago
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.
- 1121redblackgo 1y ago
  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.
  - D13Fd 1y ago
    PDF Expert is excellent. It's insane to me that they don't bring it to PC. It would be a gold mine.
    - wpm 1y ago
      PDF Expert can tap into the Quartz 2D API on Apple platforms, which is likely why they’re excellent. PDFs have been first class citizens on Mac OS X and its derivatives for 25 years.
  - HPsquared 1y ago
    Some companies are more focused on the PvP aspects of business.
  - webspinner 1y ago
    Your browser is an alternative, if you want it to be! I read PDFs in the browser quite a bit.
    - IT4MD 1y ago
      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.
dwd 1y ago
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.
prmoustache 1y ago
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?
mapierce2 1y ago
I'm pretty sure zathura works with wayland just fine.
- vincent-uden 1y ago
  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
ChuckMcM 1y ago
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/ https://www.instructables.com/HackerBox-0110-Synth/
octagons 1y ago
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…
- zaruvi 1y ago
  Yeah, it works perfectly fine for me on hyprland.
- vincent-uden 1y ago
  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
Andrex 1y ago
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.
roadbuster 1y ago
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
eulgro 1y ago
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.
nice_byte 1y ago
Just use sumatraPDF. Works on wine.
mbmjertan 1y ago
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?
- usaphp 1y ago
  You can use preview on a Mac to sign them
  - rufugee 1y ago
    As much as I despise the macOS experience, this small feature was a bright spot. So easy.
- jscyc 1y ago
  I find Foxit Reader good for signing. You can also easily disable all the internet based "features" in the settings which I appreciate.
- wodenokoto 1y ago
  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.
  - stevesimmons 1y ago
qwertytyyuu 1y ago
Edge is a decent pdf viewer, somehow adobe managed to make soemthing worse than edge
- Perz1val 1y ago
  Does the new edge still use the same PDF viewer as the non-chromium edge?
- hulitu 1y ago
  > Edge is a decent pdf viewer YMMV. For datasheets Edge is a parody. i need a TOC in a 6000 pages document, damn it.
snvzz 1y ago
Okular, KDE's PDF viewer, works on Windows/MacOS as well, and is most tolerable.
funktour 1y ago
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).
- crooked-v 1y ago
  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.
- dunham 1y ago
  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.
- sharma-arjun 1y ago
  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.
  - gsinclair 1y ago
    I’ve had Skim crash on me several times. I still like it though.
- the-mitr 1y ago
  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
rayiner 1y ago
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.)
- karthink 1y ago
  > 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 https://tv.dyne.org/w/wcedffVATJGwLSCqta6pk1
nye2k 1y ago
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.
sys_64738 1y ago
I would never infect my computer with any Adobe spyware.
cubefox 1y ago
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 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.
jimjimjim 1y ago
Writing a good pdf writer is easy. Writing a good pdf reader is extremely difficult.
daft_pink 1y ago
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.
teleforce 1y ago
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.
webspinner 1y ago
I just uninstalled it, and ditched it for something else.
scuff3d 1y ago
If Zathura works on X11 wouldn't it work with Xwayland?
- vincent-uden 1y ago
  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
  - scuff3d 1y ago
    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.
m463 1y ago
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.
- vincent-uden 1y ago
  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
insane_dreamer 1y ago
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.)
mgt19937 1y ago
There is a pure rust library for rendering pdfs to png(or bitmap) and svg: https://github.com/LaurenzV/hayro 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 https://github.com/typst/typst/pull/6623
- vincent-uden 1y ago
  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.
  - mgt19937 1y ago
    Thank you for the information!
classified 1y ago
Acrobat is malware.
Gazoche 1y ago
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.
kmfrk 1y ago
Very sweet project, it basically feels like mpv[1] for pdf. [1]: https://mpv.io https://mpv.io
airstrike 1y ago
I'm a simple man. I see iced, I upvote
relatall 1y ago
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.
- JBlue42 1y ago
  >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.

193 points by vincent-uden 1y ago

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.

clickety_clack 1y ago

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.

gdulli 1y ago
Firefox has never failed me for this. It's great not needing a separate program at all.
- clickety_clack 1y ago
  I never had any problems with the Mac preview app before either, until these specific forms required something specifically from acrobat.
- noahmasur 1y ago
  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.
  - Benanov 1y ago
    stupidly does it block the Microsoft XPS printer?
itopaloglu83 1y ago
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.
- dylan604 1y ago
  > 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?
  - itopaloglu83 1y ago
    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.
  - hulitu 1y ago
    > Did you find out why it was uploading files, and more importantly, where? Why ? PRISM. Where ? Who cares.

elorant 1y ago

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.

Gualdrapo 1y ago
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

mananaysiempre 1y ago

No mention of Sumatra PDF[1]? Windows (only), open source, uses MuPDF. [1] https://www.sumatrapdfreader.org/ https://www.sumatrapdfreader.org/

zamadatix 1y ago
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!
globalnode 1y ago
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.
- Muromec 1y ago
  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.
  - techjamie 1y ago
    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.
    - mananaysiempre 1y ago
      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.)
1y ago

porphyra 1y ago

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 https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/masterpdfeditor-free

sigsergv 1y ago
And commercial version is not that expensive considering how good it is.

karsa_orlong 1y ago

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.

adamnemecek 1y ago

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.

243524352435 1y ago
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. :-)
crazygringo 1y ago
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?
- adamnemecek 1y ago
  > 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 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.
seemaze 1y ago
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..

asdff 1y ago

How about the fact they charge $25/mo for acrobat

annoyingnoob 1y ago

Adobe is trash, bloated, over-priced software that is mostly DRM. Paying customer? Adobe hates you, but not your money.

munk-a 1y ago
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.

gdevenyi 1y ago

No mention of Okular from KDE.

lurk2 1y ago
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.
jwrallie 1y ago
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.

nipperkinfeet 1y ago

We all do. There are many amazing alternatives nowadays. No need for any Adobe products.

superkuh 1y ago
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 http://www.adobe.com/go/reader_download. For more assistance with Adobe Reader visit http://www.adobe.com/go/acrreader 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 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.
- glkindlmann 1y ago
  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 ...
  - GuB-42 1y ago
    Indeed, the "Chuck Geschke spinning in his grave" animation wouldn't have been possible without Flash support!

LeoPanthera 1y ago

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.)

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

OGEnthusiast 1y ago

Preview.app is actually one of the few first-party Apple apps that I really miss when using a non-macOS computer.

benjaminclauss 1y ago
and now on iPad... finally
dylan604 1y ago
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.
- Forgeties79 1y ago
  Preview as someone who work in media production is borderline a must-have at this point. Fastest spot checks one could hope for.
- kennyadam 1y ago
  Microsoft PowerToys has this functionality, called Peek: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/peek https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/peek
  - dylan604 1y ago
    Is that something that comes built-in or installed?
    - wlesieutre 1y ago
      Installed, but includes a lot of other handy features and is highly recommended
      - dylan604 1y ago

treetalker 1y ago

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.

neilv 1y ago

> 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.

bix6 1y ago

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.

observationist 1y ago
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.
- bix6 1y ago
  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.
cyanydeez 1y ago
Acrobat 9.0
- bix6 1y ago
  I can’t legally buy that anymore and I’d need to downgrade OS to use it anyways?
  - cyanydeez 1y ago
    It runs on windows 11 https://www.ebay.com/itm/144554666031?_skw=adobe+acrobat+9+pro&itmmeta=01K7S136S6DN6NPZS907VMD9F8&hash=item21a821282f%3Ag%3ASKoAAOSwc%7E9kLIMu&itmprp=enc%3AAQAKAAAA0FkggFvd1GGDu0w3yXCmi1eOBHWVm45rH2aCYh6C4RjfvikxuUPrkxXBUDII0PGgRZtR0YtAJM9FJQkXqPN8G22ZQz9vJdlvarOgdei%2Fy5dpHyNho3b60IzOqpuqyl2JsxLucfxbHeTet1nI%2Ftc%2B%2BOj3I580QXsdgYQTuwKLxW7toPq19KztQRj4KyBpX1Q0UA6BULX1jKofCzy7LOV8AVoaEksYv420CFrkAecLeNe1PZMuRgYalomK7ZIPb0utXZQ2QMMYPoxHqU5JyIkTo30%3D%7Ctkp%3ABlBMUNjsjKG-Zg&keyword=adobe+acrobat+9+pro&sacat=0&relatedSearch=true https://www.ebay.com/itm/144554666031?_skw=adobe+acrobat+9+p...

crazygringo 1y ago

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).

stefanos82 1y ago

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!

diegof79 1y ago

Preview is probably the best thing that has happened since I switched to Mac almost two decades ago.

seemaze 1y ago
Hardest working app on macOS

quickthrowman 1y ago

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.

tombert 1y ago

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.

vincent-uden 1y ago
From a quick glance it seems to be a GNOME application? So that would rule out Windows support right?
- tombert 1y ago
  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.

juliangmp 1y ago

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.

1121redblackgo 1y ago
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.
- D13Fd 1y ago
  PDF Expert is excellent. It's insane to me that they don't bring it to PC. It would be a gold mine.
  - wpm 1y ago
    PDF Expert can tap into the Quartz 2D API on Apple platforms, which is likely why they’re excellent. PDFs have been first class citizens on Mac OS X and its derivatives for 25 years.
- HPsquared 1y ago
  Some companies are more focused on the PvP aspects of business.
- webspinner 1y ago
  Your browser is an alternative, if you want it to be! I read PDFs in the browser quite a bit.
  - IT4MD 1y ago
    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.

dwd 1y ago

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.

prmoustache 1y ago

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?

mapierce2 1y ago

I'm pretty sure zathura works with wayland just fine.

vincent-uden 1y ago
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

ChuckMcM 1y ago

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/ https://www.instructables.com/HackerBox-0110-Synth/

octagons 1y ago

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…

zaruvi 1y ago
Yeah, it works perfectly fine for me on hyprland.
vincent-uden 1y ago
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

Andrex 1y ago

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.

roadbuster 1y ago

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

eulgro 1y ago

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.

nice_byte 1y ago

Just use sumatraPDF. Works on wine.

mbmjertan 1y ago

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?

usaphp 1y ago
You can use preview on a Mac to sign them
- rufugee 1y ago
  As much as I despise the macOS experience, this small feature was a bright spot. So easy.
jscyc 1y ago
I find Foxit Reader good for signing. You can also easily disable all the internet based "features" in the settings which I appreciate.
wodenokoto 1y ago
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.
- stevesimmons 1y ago

qwertytyyuu 1y ago

Edge is a decent pdf viewer, somehow adobe managed to make soemthing worse than edge

Perz1val 1y ago
Does the new edge still use the same PDF viewer as the non-chromium edge?
hulitu 1y ago
> Edge is a decent pdf viewer YMMV. For datasheets Edge is a parody. i need a TOC in a 6000 pages document, damn it.

snvzz 1y ago

Okular, KDE's PDF viewer, works on Windows/MacOS as well, and is most tolerable.

funktour 1y ago

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).

crooked-v 1y ago
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.
dunham 1y ago
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.
sharma-arjun 1y ago
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.
- gsinclair 1y ago
  I’ve had Skim crash on me several times. I still like it though.
the-mitr 1y ago
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

rayiner 1y ago

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.)

karthink 1y ago
> 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 https://tv.dyne.org/w/wcedffVATJGwLSCqta6pk1

nye2k 1y ago

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.

sys_64738 1y ago

I would never infect my computer with any Adobe spyware.

cubefox 1y ago

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 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.

jimjimjim 1y ago

Writing a good pdf writer is easy. Writing a good pdf reader is extremely difficult.

daft_pink 1y ago

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.

teleforce 1y ago

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.

webspinner 1y ago

I just uninstalled it, and ditched it for something else.

scuff3d 1y ago

If Zathura works on X11 wouldn't it work with Xwayland?

vincent-uden 1y ago
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
- scuff3d 1y ago
  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.

m463 1y ago

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.

vincent-uden 1y ago
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

insane_dreamer 1y ago

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.)

mgt19937 1y ago

There is a pure rust library for rendering pdfs to png(or bitmap) and svg: https://github.com/LaurenzV/hayro 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 https://github.com/typst/typst/pull/6623

vincent-uden 1y ago
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.
- mgt19937 1y ago
  Thank you for the information!

classified 1y ago

Acrobat is malware.

Gazoche 1y ago

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.

kmfrk 1y ago

Very sweet project, it basically feels like mpv[1] for pdf. [1]: https://mpv.io https://mpv.io

airstrike 1y ago

I'm a simple man. I see iced, I upvote

relatall 1y ago

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.

JBlue42 1y ago
>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.