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.
> the entire corporate world for 2 decades while being that mediocre
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. :)
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.
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.
Adding content to a PDF, such as a signature, falls under the PDF editor umbrella. Sumatra PDF is purely a PDF reader, so (sadly) does not implement any editing features.
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?
If you want to add signatures, the best option is to use a PDF viewer that supports that directly (FoxIt Reader, for one). That saves the original PDF plus an annotation for the signature.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It was never an integral part of the windowing system of either operating system. That idea never panned out. Quartz's drawing functions included what was needed for postscript, but the UI was done solely with bitmaps and cached bitmaps. There's PDF APIs in there, but they're not anything special, like being super fast, efficient, or hardware-accelerated.
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!
Yeah, I've been very happy with it over the years. But my one minor nit-pick is that it uses a _lot_ of memory. I presume it is pre-rendering stuff for speed.
Interesting. I personally never liked Preview. No way to configure it to open maximized, so every time I open a Preview window, I have to maximize it manually.
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.
Readit News
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.
[1] https://www.sumatrapdfreader.org/
[1] https://www.pdf-xchange.com/
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.