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Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable

vincentuden.xyz

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Re: Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable

#71

Post by mbmjertan »

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?

Re: Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable

#73

Post by fragmede »

juliangmp wrote: post #42

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.

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?

Re: Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable

#75

Post by jwrallie »

gdevenyi wrote: post #13

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.

Re: Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable

#76

Post by bee_rider »

donatj wrote: post #57
OGEnthusiast wrote: post #21

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

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.

Re: Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable

#77

Post by usaphp »

mbmjertan wrote: post #71

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 (althoug…

You can use preview on a Mac to sign them

Re: Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable

#78

Post by rufugee »

usaphp wrote: post #77
mbmjertan wrote: post #71

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 (althoug…

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.

Re: Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable

#79

Post by foofoo55 »

mananaysiempre wrote: post #5

No mention of Sumatra PDF[1]? Windows (only), open source, uses MuPDF. [1] https://www.sumatrapdfreader.org/

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/

Re: Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable

#80

Post by kstrauser »

hollerith wrote: post #58
donatj wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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:

  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
(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!

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