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Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable

vincentuden.xyz

11–20 of 174 posts

Re: Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable

#15

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.

Re: Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable

#16

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.

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.

:-)

Re: Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable

#17

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.

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

Re: Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable

#20

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.

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