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.

No mention of Sumatra PDF[1]? Windows (only), open source, uses MuPDF.

[1] https://www.sumatrapdfreader.org/

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.

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

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 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.)

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!

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

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/

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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?

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.)

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

No mention of Okular from KDE.

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.

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

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

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…

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.

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

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.

I would never infect my computer with any Adobe spyware.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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

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

> 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.

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

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.

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

Just use sumatraPDF. Works on wine.

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.