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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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).
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 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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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:
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.
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?
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..
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.
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…
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
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.
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
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
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).
juliangmp|4 months ago
1121redblackgo|4 months ago
Also equally baffling how mediocre all the alternatives are.
russellbeattie|4 months ago
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.
sureglymop|4 months ago
mananaysiempre|4 months ago
fragmede|4 months ago
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?
Perepiska|4 months ago
My favorite "the worst PDF reader" is MacOS Preview.
hulitu|4 months ago
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.
IT4MD|4 months ago
Half my org still uses Outlook classic and even it's laughably unstable.
mananaysiempre|4 months ago
[1] https://www.sumatrapdfreader.org/
foofoo55|4 months ago
[1] https://www.pdf-xchange.com/
zamadatix|4 months ago
What a great PDF reader. kjksf, thank you!
jesuslop|4 months ago
vincent-uden|4 months ago
Saris|4 months ago
globalnode|4 months ago
Mengkudulangsat|4 months ago
mbmjertan|4 months ago
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|4 months ago
jscyc|4 months ago
wodenokoto|4 months ago
I use that to sign with “image of my signature” style of signing.
kochikame|4 months ago
clickety_clack|4 months ago
itopaloglu83|4 months ago
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.
gdulli|4 months ago
OGEnthusiast|4 months ago
dylan604|4 months ago
russellbeattie|4 months ago
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.
sings|4 months ago
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!
donatj|4 months ago
Unchallenged, and for something like 20 plus years running.
benjaminclauss|4 months ago
dwd|4 months ago
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.
funktour|4 months ago
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).
the-mitr|4 months ago
sharma-arjun|4 months ago
dunham|4 months ago
crooked-v|4 months ago
tombert|4 months ago
vincent-uden|4 months ago
LeoPanthera|4 months ago
stefanos82|4 months ago
My preference by far is qpdfview, but I also use Okular (KDE), Evince, its fork for MATE desktop environment, Atril, and of course xpdf!
porphyra|4 months ago
sigsergv|4 months ago
quickthrowman|4 months ago
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.
nipperkinfeet|4 months ago
superkuh|4 months ago
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.
teleforce|4 months ago
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.
ChuckMcM|4 months ago
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/
diegof79|4 months ago
seemaze|4 months ago
treetalker|4 months ago
gdevenyi|4 months ago
jwrallie|4 months ago
lurk2|4 months ago
asdff|4 months ago
bix6|4 months ago
cyanydeez|4 months ago
observationist|4 months ago
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.
prmoustache|4 months ago
daft_pink|4 months ago
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.
mgt19937|4 months ago
[1]: https://github.com/typst/typst/pull/6623
vincent-uden|4 months ago
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.
cubefox|4 months ago
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.
nye2k|4 months ago
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.
prmoustache|4 months ago
elorant|4 months ago
Gualdrapo|4 months ago
https://www.davidrevoy.com/static2/about-me
eulgro|4 months ago
- Viewing Altium generated schematics, which have some macros that only work in Acrobat.
- Printing stuff. Acrobat print dialog is pretty good.
annoyingnoob|4 months ago
munk-a|4 months ago
rayiner|4 months ago
karthink|4 months ago
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
Gazoche|4 months ago
adamnemecek|4 months ago
Look I know that I probably should not have 200 PDFs open, but Preview should not be consuming 40GB of memory.
crazygringo|4 months ago
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?
seemaze|4 months ago
243524352435|4 months ago
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.
:-)
karsa_orlong|4 months ago
What I really want is a PDF editor, with just highlighting functionality, that works like the visual mode.
qwertytyyuu|4 months ago
hulitu|4 months ago
YMMV. For datasheets Edge is a parody. i need a TOC in a 6000 pages document, damn it.
Perz1val|4 months ago
roadbuster|4 months ago
https://pdfium.googlesource.com/pdfium
m463|4 months ago
- 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|4 months ago
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
relatall|4 months ago
JBlue42|4 months ago
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.
octagons|4 months ago
Either way, if you want to show off a project, just do so…
vincent-uden|4 months ago
zaruvi|4 months ago
insane_dreamer|4 months ago
Andrex|4 months ago
Scene_Cast2|4 months ago
I'm all for a good Acrobat alternative though.
mapierce2|4 months ago
vincent-uden|4 months ago
kmfrk|4 months ago
[1]: https://mpv.io
snvzz|4 months ago
jimjimjim|4 months ago
unknown|4 months ago
[deleted]
scuff3d|4 months ago
vincent-uden|4 months ago
webspinner|4 months ago
sys_64738|4 months ago
crazygringo|4 months ago
I guess I hate Acrobat too, but I virtually never have to use it (except for tax forms, ugh).
airstrike|4 months ago
nice_byte|4 months ago
classified|4 months ago
neilv|4 months ago
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.