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The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years

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Re: The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years

#51

Post by eviks »

perching_aix wrote: post #30
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.

> annoying pop ups Are pop-ups ever not annoying? :) Been on mind a lot lately actually, and I basically cannot come up with a situation where popups are actually an unavoidable and proper good choice. Not from a user perspective anyways (from a dev perspective, it's an easy way out and a "good" way to attention grab... and then not hold).

Maybe when you repeatedly try to do an impossible action and don't understand more subtle UI cues? The the popup would be correctly interfering to explain the frustration of the repeated fails?

Re: The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years

#52

Post by behnamoh »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #43
behnamoh wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Ever since 3 years ago, every time I open a PDF in Preview it somehow scales it wrong, so swiping left and right jiggles the PDF... (Not that I swipe left/right intentionally, but that happens when swiping up/down). I alway have to zoom out a bit so the document correctly fits the screen and swiping left/right gets disabled.

Re: The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years

#53

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

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.

There are a lot of classic PDF features that are still unimplemented by alternative viewers. For work I have to use Reader for clickable metadata popups that other viewers don't support.

Re: The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years

#54

Post by diggan »

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?

Woah, page-by-page? I wasn't aware of that, I guess I'll give it a try the next time I'm in front of a Mac and need to join PDFs again :)

Re: The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years

#56

Post by pessimizer »

on_the_train wrote: post #16
patcon wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

doesn't it looking straight (ish) on a log axis mean it's an exponential relationship, not linear?

The quantity (file size) is a linear one

What does it mean for a quantity to be linear?

edit: I'm late...

Re: The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years

#57

Post by vondur »

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've seen that many forms just don't work properly in Preview. I'm not sure if it's due to custom stuff that only Acrobat does or just features that Apple doesn't want to include in preview. But I can always tell with some forms that they've been filled out in Preview on Mac due to how they mangle it.

Re: The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years

#58

Post by diggan »

mynameismon wrote: post #40
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.

For those who have an installation of LaTeX: It is pretty easy to use LaTeX for this.

> It is pretty easy to use LaTeX for this.

Without looking it up the arguments/syntax, how do I do "join page 2-3 from PDF A with page 7-23 from PDF B"?

If it's more than one CLI invocation, easy to remember/find in the shell history and less than 80 characters long, I'm not sure I'd call it easy :)

Re: The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years

#59

Post by alnwlsn »

scrumper wrote: post #28
iJohnDoe wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All browsers open PDF files really well and sometimes better than Acrobat. Just need Chrome, Firefox, Edge, etc.

I'm generally looking at multi kilopage manuals where rapid search and navigation are important, and good zooming for diagrams. I didn't even try a browser as the machine is a bit constrained and I just thought it'd be too slow. But I'll try...

I run into this problem so often that I've been experimenting with rendering all the PDF pages to png images first, and a program that loads all of them on screen at once.

The upside is that it is extremely fast, there is no loading time because all the images are loaded already.

The downside is that it uses an obscene amount of memory. A 500 page manual could run you 8-10Gb of RAM. Also there is no more text highlighting or control-F.

But the fact that even this "works" as well as it does indicates how much worse PDF readers are at this, especially when you get those scanned documents that still have the full images anyways, with lousy or no OCR. They take forever (multiple seconds per page) to load when your in a PDF in chrome and jump somewhere else in the document. Why not go back to image files for those ones to begin with?

Re: The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years

#60

Post by sixothree »

IshKebab wrote: post #14

> for anyone sane would install it via scoop anyway The lack of awareness here is mind-blowing. Good post otherwise. Great graph.

This attitude rubs me the wrong way and sadly pollutes the rest of the article. Not understanding that organizations and people all have different needs is such a blind point of view. Not acknowledging winget or chocolatey much less suggesting using them (or gasp, the web site) to be insane is so wrong-headed.
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