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.

> They designed the PDF format but still manage to have the worst PDF reader on the entire market.

Hm. I hate Acrobat but it is still the best pdf program on Windows.

pdf.js is a parody if you have more than 3 pages.

This is a lot like Microsoft having Outlook for multiple decades and it's somehow still the very worst email client.

Half my org still uses Outlook classic and even it's laughably unstable.

Our favorite is still PDF-XChange [1] which has been our daily driver for years. Only dislike is the difficulty in opening a document in a separate application window. It's either everything in one window or everything in its own window.

[1] https://www.pdf-xchange.com/

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!

Ohh, daily driver here. You can configure external apps to open the pdf (in a given page) and choose your hotkey for it, and with some effort, that supercharges the reading. With some scripting and using the grand pymupdf library one can customize it as deeply as one wishes.

Sumatra PDF totally slipped my mind. I think I had issues with getting VIM bindings to work as I wanted to, but they for sure deserve a mention.

Firefox also let's you edit PDFs so thats been my go to for awhile now.

ok thank you so much... finally an open source pdf reader thats not acrobat that works (hopefully, still testing). on the issue of pdf forms, my gosh they just should not exist, thats what web pages are for.

I love sumatra but I can't figure out how to sign with it.

You can use preview on a Mac to sign them

I find Foxit Reader good for signing. You can also easily disable all the internet based "features" in the settings which I appreciate.

Edges pdf viewer lets you draw on pdf after which you can print to pdf.

I use that to sign with “image of my signature” style of signing.

I guess you can't just use a photo because it would make it too easy to use someone else's signature

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.

Firefox has never failed me for this. It's great not needing a separate program at all.

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!

I came here to say how spoiled we are as Mac users. Preview is genuinely the best PDF reader. Full stop.

Unchallenged, and for something like 20 plus years running.

and now on iPad... finally

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.

From a quick glance it seems to be a GNOME application? So that would rule out Windows support right?

And commercial version is not that expensive considering how good it is.

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.

Hardest working app on macOS

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.

Acrobat 9.0

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.

Not sure why would anyone edit a pdf. To me this is a format you export to, not a draft/working doc format.

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.

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

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.

> 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

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..

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.

:-)

> Edge is a decent pdf viewer

YMMV. For datasheets Edge is a parody. i need a TOC in a 6000 pages document, damn it.

Does the new edge still use the same PDF viewer as the non-chromium edge?

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

>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.

Of course Zathura + any backend works through XWayland. But as mentioned I also use Windows and want to use the same program (or something with the same key bindings) on both operating systems

Yeah, it works perfectly fine for me on hyprland.

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