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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

#111

Post by sharma-arjun »

funktour wrote: post #82

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 tr…

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.

Re: Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable

#112

Post by hollerith »

kstrauser wrote: post #80
hollerith wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ht…

Thanks. Will give that a try.

Re: Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable

#113

Post by bix6 »

ok123456 wrote: post #60
prmoustache wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thank you.

I am constantly mind blown by the lack of awareness around PDF use in business on this board (and O365) lol.

Re: Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable

#115

Post by webspinner »

1121redblackgo wrote: post #68
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.

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.

Your browser is an alternative, if you want it to be! I read PDFs in the browser quite a bit.

Re: Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable

#117

Post by unmole »

bee_rider wrote: post #76
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.

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.

> I’m convinced it is impossible to do better than Evince, I’ve never found any deficiency or lacking feature in the program.

For me, Evince fails to accurately show the physical paper size. Okular manages to do this just fine.

Re: Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable

#118

Post by karthink »

rayiner wrote: post #84

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.)

> pdf-tools in Emacs is much faster

pdf-tools is quite slow and a memory hog. emacs-reader is a replacement for it (still in development) that already blows every PDF reader I've ever used out of the water in performance:

https://tv.dyne.org/w/wcedffVATJGwLSCqta6pk1

Re: Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable

#119

Post by makeitdouble »

dylan604 wrote: post #92
wlesieutre wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Installed, but includes a lot of other handy features and is highly recommended

you see my point though, right?

Being baked in or not is a tradeoff. In this case I'd say it would better if it was in, but having a one time download from a trusted source isn't the end of the world either.

I'd make the parallel with browsers: there's an argument for them to stay decoupled from the system.

Re: Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable

#120

Post by wlesieutre »

makeitdouble wrote: post #119
dylan604 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you see my point though, right?

Being baked in or not is a tradeoff. In this case I'd say it would better if it was in, but having a one time download from a trusted source isn't the end of the world either. I'd make the parallel with browsers: there's an argument for them to stay decoupled from the system.

I suspect being an optionally installable tool for power users gives their team more flexibility to make it a good product in an attempt to keep those users on Windows, if it had big user numbers they’d have to turn it into PowerToys 365 Copilot and make it so opening anything with the launcher tool somehow involved a round-trip through Edge and Bing
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