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? and 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.
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 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.
Constantly. They added a bunch of scripting extensions so a lot of fillable forms render a message telling you to use Acrobat until all of that stuff executes.
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.
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?
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.
They're also amazing for digital TTRPG sheets. You can send around the PDF form, and everyone can fill out and store their own sheet, print it, send it back to the GM, whatever the group needs.
To be clear, there are multiple kinds of PDF form. GGP might have had experience with one of those that are actually supposed to be submitted over the Internet straight from the PDF reader. (Not only is this a thing that Adobe did to their format, it is IIRC a thing that they did to it in more than one way.)
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.
We didn't have the subscription, and there was no option to upload documents, or any information in the app preferences as to what was happening at all.
So, we couldn't find any information why it was happening, except after our complain and an update later, the background service started closing files when the Adobe app was exited.
We had tens of thousands of applicant documents, most of them contained personally identifiable information (PII) about future students, those files should not be even stored locally, except for the protected PII storage, yet along being uploaded to a random S3 bucket somewhere to be stolen by hackers.
If you're using Windows and have Adobe installed, just check your running programs and on top you'll see that weird Adobe service that you cannot disable even if you turn off its auto-start feature. Acrobat reader is supposed to be a PDF viewer, why does it even have a background service for f.ck sake.
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.
To pile on wlesieutre's point, it's a separate app but should be part of every user install IMHO.
Keyboard manager for instance is plenty powerful while keeping a very simple interface, and will paliate the need for AutoHotKey for most people.
There's a flurry of other stuff that I guess Microsoft employees felt are tremendously helpful but couldn't convince management to bake into the system.
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.
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.
Anyway, you're on a Mac. Fix it yourself. Run the Shortcuts app and create a shortcut called something like "Maximize Preview". Set it to run an AppleScript:
on run {input, parameters}
tell application "Preview" to activate
tell application "System Events" to set value of attribute "AXFullScreen" of front window of (first process whose frontmost is true) to true
return input
end run
Now in Shortcuts create an automation that runs when Preview is opened, and select that shortcut you just created as its action. You may have to go into System Settings > Privacy & Security > Accessibility and let Shortcuts and siriactionsd access to control your desktop.
Basically, you're doing something very uncommon for a Mac desktop, so it's not going to help you with that by default. It doesn't mean you're powerless to change it, though!
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).
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 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 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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
Thank you for giving the specific name ("Dynamic XFA (XML Form Architecture)") to the kind of PDF that generates the "Please wait" message. I have seen this and never understood how it arises. Chuck Geschke spins in his grave ...
That would be one of the reasons I’d have a dedicated computer that I power on for these kinds of things. Better than suffer bad software all the times.
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 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’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.)
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.
Reorder pages. Redact. Need to make a minor change, and don't have the original. Digitally sign a document. Comment on a document. Join several documents together.
As much as I agree, I've lost track of how often someone's given me a PDF form to fill out. While driving down to the print store during business hours for a scanner is possible, it's a lot easier to make a sacrifice to the dark gods of format abuse instead.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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..
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.
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? and 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.
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.
Some companies are more focused on the PvP aspects of business.
PDF Expert is excellent. It's insane to me that they don't bring it to PC. It would be a gold mine.
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.
Wait, this actually happens?
Constantly. They added a bunch of scripting extensions so a lot of fillable forms render a message telling you to use Acrobat until all of that stuff executes.
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.
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?
No mention of Sumatra PDF[1]? Windows (only), open source, uses MuPDF.
[1] https://www.sumatrapdfreader.org/
I love sumatra but I can't figure out how to sign with it.
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/
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.
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!
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.
They're also amazing for digital TTRPG sheets. You can send around the PDF form, and everyone can fill out and store their own sheet, print it, send it back to the GM, whatever the group needs.
To be clear, there are multiple kinds of PDF form. GGP might have had experience with one of those that are actually supposed to be submitted over the Internet straight from the PDF reader. (Not only is this a thing that Adobe did to their format, it is IIRC a thing that they did to it in more than one way.)
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?
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 find Foxit Reader good for signing. You can also easily disable all the internet based "features" in the settings which I appreciate.
You can use preview on a Mac to sign them
As much as I despise the macOS experience, this small feature was a bright spot. So easy.
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.
> 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?
We didn't have the subscription, and there was no option to upload documents, or any information in the app preferences as to what was happening at all.
So, we couldn't find any information why it was happening, except after our complain and an update later, the background service started closing files when the Adobe app was exited.
We had tens of thousands of applicant documents, most of them contained personally identifiable information (PII) about future students, those files should not be even stored locally, except for the protected PII storage, yet along being uploaded to a random S3 bucket somewhere to be stolen by hackers.
If you're using Windows and have Adobe installed, just check your running programs and on top you'll see that weird Adobe service that you cannot disable even if you turn off its auto-start feature. Acrobat reader is supposed to be a PDF viewer, why does it even have a background service for f.ck sake.
Firefox has never failed me for this. It's great not needing a separate program at all.
I never had any problems with the Mac preview app before either, until these specific forms required something specifically from acrobat.
Preview.app is actually one of the few first-party Apple apps that I really miss when using a non-macOS 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.
Microsoft PowerToys has this functionality, called Peek: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/peek
Is that something that comes built-in or installed?
To pile on wlesieutre's point, it's a separate app but should be part of every user install IMHO.
Keyboard manager for instance is plenty powerful while keeping a very simple interface, and will paliate the need for AutoHotKey for most people.
There's a flurry of other stuff that I guess Microsoft employees felt are tremendously helpful but couldn't convince management to bake into the system.
Installed, but includes a lot of other handy features and is highly recommended
you see my point though, right?
Preview as someone who work in media production is borderline a must-have at this point. Fastest spot checks one could hope for.
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.
and now on iPad... finally
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.
I’m convinced it is impossible to do better than Evince, I’ve never found any deficiency or lacking feature in the program.
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.
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.
On iPhone and iPad I've been using Notability.
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.
But... why?
Anyway, you're on a Mac. Fix it yourself. Run the Shortcuts app and create a shortcut called something like "Maximize Preview". Set it to run an AppleScript:
(Download that from https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/96b7c0fef90a408ba3c3bcaedfb... if you trust me — which you probably shouldn't — and you don't want to type it in.)Now in Shortcuts create an automation that runs when Preview is opened, and select that shortcut you just created as its action. You may have to go into System Settings > Privacy & Security > Accessibility and let Shortcuts and siriactionsd access to control your desktop.
Basically, you're doing something very uncommon for a Mac desktop, so it's not going to help you with that by default. It doesn't mean you're powerless to change it, though!
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).
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 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 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.
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.
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!
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/
We all do. There are many amazing alternatives nowadays. No need for any Adobe products.
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.
Thank you for giving the specific name ("Dynamic XFA (XML Form Architecture)") to the kind of PDF that generates the "Please wait" message. I have seen this and never understood how it arises. Chuck Geschke spins in his grave ...
Indeed, the "Chuck Geschke spinning in his grave" animation wouldn't have been possible without Flash support!
That would be one of the reasons I’d have a dedicated computer that I power on for these kinds of things. Better than suffer bad software all the times.
>Which is basically a PDF without content that pulls down all its content from the web.
…why?
Isn’t that literally a website at this point? What benefit can you possibly have over a link ?
Adobe gets to charge somebody a big bag of money.
Preview is probably the best thing that has happened since I switched to Mac almost two decades ago.
Hardest working app on macOS
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 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’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.)
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
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.
Acrobat 9.0
I can’t legally buy that anymore and I’d need to downgrade OS to use it anyways?
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.
We have to manipulate 100 page PDFs, that sounds like a nightmare.
I also can’t run sensitive docs through LLMs. This stuff has to stay local.
Not sure why would anyone edit a pdf. To me this is a format you export to, not a draft/working doc format.
Reorder pages. Redact. Need to make a minor change, and don't have the original. Digitally sign a document. Comment on a document. Join several documents together.
There are a bunch of reasons.
As much as I agree, I've lost track of how often someone's given me a PDF form to fill out. While driving down to the print store during business hours for a scanner is possible, it's a lot easier to make a sacrifice to the dark gods of format abuse instead.
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?
Edge is a decent pdf viewer, somehow adobe managed to make soemthing worse than edge
Does the new edge still use the same PDF viewer as the non-chromium edge?
No mention of Okular from KDE.
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.
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
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.
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
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…
Yeah, it works perfectly fine for me on hyprland.
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.
I would never infect my computer with any Adobe spyware.
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.
Writing a good pdf writer is easy. Writing a good pdf reader is extremely difficult.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Okular, KDE's PDF viewer, works on Windows/MacOS as well, and is most tolerable.
Just use sumatraPDF. Works on wine.
> 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.
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.
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..