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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

#101

Post by clickety_clack »

gdulli wrote: post #17
clickety_clack wrote: post #3

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.

I never had any problems with the Mac preview app before either, until these specific forms required something specifically from acrobat.

Re: Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable

#103

Post by daft_pink »

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.

Re: Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable

#104

Post by jscyc »

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…

I find Foxit Reader good for signing. You can also easily disable all the internet based "features" in the settings which I appreciate.

Re: Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable

#105

Post by BearOso »

russellbeattie wrote: post #90
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.

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…

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.

Re: Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable

#106

Post by teleforce »

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.

Re: Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable

#107

Post by wodenokoto »

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…

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.

Re: Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable

#108

Post by mananaysiempre »

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.

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? also 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.

Re: Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable

#109

Post by mananaysiempre »

techjamie wrote: post #63
Muromec wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)
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