Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years

sigwait.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 141 posts

Re: The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years

#41

Post by episteme »

diggan wrote: post #36
robin_reala wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re talking Mac, why on earth would you install Adobe Reader? I’m sure there’s a different set of 5% functionality for power users, but Preview does everything I need (including things like signature annotation, real redaction, joining multiple PDFs together) and it does it quickly and with everything enabled for free.

> joining multiple PDFs together What about joining page 2-3 from PDF A with page 7-23 from PDF B? I remember that being a huge hassle on macOS when I was using it years ago. Think I ended up using some cloud service/website for it since the documents weren't confidential at all.

Can’t you just drag and drop across preview windows?

Re: The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years

#42

Post by behnamoh »

robin_reala wrote: post #34
behnamoh wrote: post #4

Adobe Reader is the first app I don't install on new machines. It's slow and sluggish, riddled with dark patterns and annoying pop ups, disrespects the user in every possible way, and hides basic editing functionality behind subscriptions. The trashiest piece of crap software. It's up there with MS Word (which gets progressively more bloated on Mac). Edit: Added "software" after crap for clarity.

If you’re talking Mac, why on earth would you install Adobe Reader? I’m sure there’s a different set of 5% functionality for power users, but Preview does everything I need (including things like signature annotation, real redaction, joining multiple PDFs together) and it does it quickly and with everything enabled for free.

You're right, why would anyone use Adobe Reader instead of the built-in Preview on Mac? Though Preview has its own limitations.

Re: The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years

#43

Post by JKCalhoun »

behnamoh wrote: post #42
robin_reala wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re talking Mac, why on earth would you install Adobe Reader? I’m sure there’s a different set of 5% functionality for power users, but Preview does everything I need (including things like signature annotation, real redaction, joining multiple PDFs together) and it does it quickly and with everything enabled for free.

You're right, why would anyone use Adobe Reader instead of the built-in Preview on Mac? Though Preview has its own limitations.

How does Preview suck? The only thing that comes to mind is that it is missing some advanced PDF features that involve JavaScript (which, to some, might be seen as an asset).

Re: The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years

#44

Post by JKCalhoun »

episteme wrote: post #41
diggan wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> joining multiple PDFs together What about joining page 2-3 from PDF A with page 7-23 from PDF B? I remember that being a huge hassle on macOS when I was using it years ago. Think I ended up using some cloud service/website for it since the documents weren't confidential at all.

Can’t you just drag and drop across preview windows?

You can — just drag the thumbnails.

The only downside to this, that I am aware of, is that a new PDF is created (rendered into a new PDF context). That can be lossy in some cases (if there are features that Preview does not support that get "dropped on the floor") and it is possible for the resulting PDF to be larger than the original(s).

Re: The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years

#45

Post by ThomasGlanzmann »

alnwlsn wrote: post #27
ElectronBadger wrote: post #3

Meanwhile... > apt show zathura | grep Size Installed-Size: 1,018 kB Download-Size: 224 kB

My favorite PDF reader currently. It's limited, but faster than anything I've tried.

Mupdf searches large pdfs much faster. However since I switched to wayland/sway I also use zathura because cut & paste works. Mupdf is an X application but I still use it to search large pdfs. But there is also this plugin but I did not try hard enough to get it running: https://github.com/pwmt/zathura-pdf-mupdf. Under xorg worked cut & paste with mupdf.

Re: The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years

#46

Post by ZetaRicky »

user_7832 wrote: post #26

Tangential, is there any good smooth scrolling PDF viewer (for windows at least), that offers some level of customisation of view? (Like 2 pages side by side, and ideally dark mode and full top to bottom pages with hidden toolbars.) Adobe Viewer (? not sure of the name) was the only adobe product that had this ability afaik, and while I managed to get an old exe, it's been discontinued unfortunately. The closest appe…

Maybe Okular can be tweaked this way

Re: The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years

#47

Post by kotaKat »

scrumper wrote: post #7

I was pretty shocked by this. I recently bought an old PC laptop to use in my workshop, to run some engine diagnostic software and machine control stuff that doesn't work on Mac. Of course one of the first things it needed was some PDF reading tool so I went for Reader, figuring Adobe's tool would be the least scummy. Installed it and suddenly I was getting McAfee popups? God knows what else it installed along with i…

Literally the same. Went to deploy a Windows 7 laptop for some Motorola software and documentation and went to download the latest Reader executable.

I was shocked when the offered executable for Windows 7 was the 600MB+ release and ended up dumping it for SumatraPDF myself.

8 MB is so much nicer than 600, especially on a laptop with only 1GB of RAM.

Re: The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years

#48

Post by ilamont »

robin_reala wrote: post #34
behnamoh wrote: post #4

Adobe Reader is the first app I don't install on new machines. It's slow and sluggish, riddled with dark patterns and annoying pop ups, disrespects the user in every possible way, and hides basic editing functionality behind subscriptions. The trashiest piece of crap software. It's up there with MS Word (which gets progressively more bloated on Mac). Edit: Added "software" after crap for clarity.

If you’re talking Mac, why on earth would you install Adobe Reader? I’m sure there’s a different set of 5% functionality for power users, but Preview does everything I need (including things like signature annotation, real redaction, joining multiple PDFs together) and it does it quickly and with everything enabled for free.

I use Preview for signature annotation, joining PDFs, deleting pages, etc. but in some cases it messes up fillable PDFs - fields aren't aligned properly, or certain math functions won't work.

Re: The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years

#49

Post by D13Fd »

robin_reala wrote: post #34
behnamoh wrote: post #4

Adobe Reader is the first app I don't install on new machines. It's slow and sluggish, riddled with dark patterns and annoying pop ups, disrespects the user in every possible way, and hides basic editing functionality behind subscriptions. The trashiest piece of crap software. It's up there with MS Word (which gets progressively more bloated on Mac). Edit: Added "software" after crap for clarity.

If you’re talking Mac, why on earth would you install Adobe Reader? I’m sure there’s a different set of 5% functionality for power users, but Preview does everything I need (including things like signature annotation, real redaction, joining multiple PDFs together) and it does it quickly and with everything enabled for free.

Preview is OK and better than Reader. But PDF Expert is excellent in every way, and is a dramatic improvement on both Adobe Acrobat and Preview. It’s so weird that they won’t release a PC version.
Post reply on HN