Acrobat is malware.
Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable
141–150 of 174 posts
Re: Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable
#142There 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…
I used preview to annotate pdf for copyediting. It was modest 100 page text only doc. After about 70 pages or so preview crashed and the file became corrupted with no way to recover the annotation or comments. Never used preview for annotation there after. But as a viewer is good
Re: Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable
#143The other day I had to use Acrobat at work and was absolutely flabbergasted by the UI. I counted no fewer than six buttons for the AI assistant but couldn't figure out how to see chapters for the document I was reading.
Re: Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable
#144Personally 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 is a lot like Microsoft having Outlook for multiple decades and it's somehow still the very worst email client.
Half my org still uses Outlook classic and even it's laughably unstable.
Re: Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This works for about 95% of the documents.
For the rest you need a purpose built reader. Often Sumatra or other open source readers will work with the more complex functions in PDFs (signing, bill processing, etc).
I have Acrobat installed on my corp laptop, but I use Sumatra rather than Acrobat, because I like my reader to simply be a reader instead of a 13GB bloated piece of garbage. I'm also a big fan of my reader not crashing at the slightest breeze.
Re: Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable
#146Acrobat 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.
If you want to add signatures, the best option is to use a PDF viewer that supports that directly (FoxIt Reader, for one). That saves the original PDF plus an annotation for the signature.
Second best is print using "Save as PDF". That saves the PDF as processed through the browser's PDF engine (PDFium, in the case of Chrome or Edge).
Worst choice is usually print using "Microsoft Print To PDF". That saves the PDF processed into a more generic way. Often the original text characters are replaced by drawings, and the final file size can be 10x what you expect.
Re: Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
I'm sorry, but are you saying pressing the space bar is a power user move? Really? MS cannot include it, as that'd be admitting someone else came up with a better move. Having it as an installable option just says, yeah, it's cool, but only for those worthy. WTF? They just as easily could have had it be ctrl+windows+spacebar, and then it would be just a natural windows user shortcut. Maybe throw in +alt so that it's…
I'm saying the features in PowerToys as a whole are. It includes weird things like a hotkey to crop a live thumbnail out of another window, or to force any window to float always on top, bring up a small thumbnail of all of your screens and click anywhere to teleport the mouse cursor.
Most people shouldn't have a hotkey to lock the active window on top of everything else. If they accidentally press it without knowing what they did, then they have a window stuck in the way and can't even get to The Google to ask it how to unstick it because they can't switch to their web browser window.
And yeah, there are also some features like Peek (the quick preview thing) that would make sense as being pulled out of PowerToys and included as native Windows features, but then they'd get fucked up by whoever is making all the godawful decisions about Windows development lately so I'm glad they haven't. If Peek were part of Windows they'd do something dumb like implement it as "Show this file in Edge" instead. Compared to PowerToys where apparently the developers have been tasked with making something good that people would want to use.
Re: Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
PDF Expert is excellent. It's insane to me that they don't bring it to PC. It would be a gold mine.
PDF Expert can tap into the Quartz 2D API on Apple platforms, which is likely why they’re excellent. PDFs have been first class citizens on Mac OS X and its derivatives for 25 years.
Re: Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable
#149Acrobat 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.
Some tax forms like NY State fill-in forms have some scripted functionality that requires Adobe Acrobat to work, and they block rendering from other PDF programs. Even worse, once you've filled in the form, their PDF then blocks Acrobat from exporting to a normal PDF (the way you can save a print preview to a PDF for later) and so the only way you can get a real PDF of it is to print it directly and then scan it back to your computer.
Re: Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable
#150Very sweet project, it basically feels like mpv[1] for pdf.
[1]: https://mpv.io