Preview.app is actually one of the few first-party Apple apps that I really miss when using a non-macOS computer.
Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable
21–30 of 174 posts
Re: Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable
#22No mention of Sumatra PDF[1]? Windows (only), open source, uses MuPDF. [1] https://www.sumatrapdfreader.org/
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.
Re: Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable
#23I 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.
Re: Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable
#24> 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.
Re: Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable
#25What 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.
Re: Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable
#26No mention of Okular from KDE.
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.
Re: Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable
#27We 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…
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 ...
Re: Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable
#28We 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…
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.
Re: Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable
#29What 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.
Re: Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable
#30What 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