Also equally baffling how mediocre all the alternatives are.
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. :)
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.
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?
My favorite "the worst PDF reader" is MacOS Preview.
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.
Half my org still uses Outlook classic and even it's laughably unstable.
What a great PDF reader. kjksf, thank you!
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 use that to sign with “image of my signature” style of signing.
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 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.
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?
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.
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!
Unchallenged, and for something like 20 plus years running.
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.
On iPhone and iPad I've been using Notability.
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.
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 haven’t run windows in any serious capacity in quite some time.
My preference by far is qpdfview, but I also use Okular (KDE), Evince, its fork for MATE desktop environment, Atril, and of course xpdf!
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.
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.
…why?
Isn’t that literally a website at this point? What benefit can you possibly have over a link ?
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.
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.
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.
I also can’t run sensitive docs through LLMs. This stuff has to stay local.
There are a bunch of reasons.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- Viewing Altium generated schematics, which have some macros that only work in Acrobat.
- Printing stuff. Acrobat print dialog is pretty good.
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:
Look I know that I probably should not have 200 PDFs open, but Preview should not be consuming 40GB of 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?
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.
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.
:-)
What I really want is a PDF editor, with just highlighting functionality, that works like the visual mode.
- 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.
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
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.
Either way, if you want to show off a project, just do so…
I'm all for a good Acrobat alternative though.
[1]: https://mpv.io
This seems pretty far to go to do it but I think you could probably get it working on Windows through WSL2.
I guess I hate Acrobat too, but I virtually never have to use it (except for tax forms, ugh).
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.
