Edge is a decent pdf viewer, somehow adobe managed to make soemthing worse than edge
Does the new edge still use the same PDF viewer as the non-chromium edge?
Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable
81–90 of 174 posts
Re: Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable
#82There 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 tries to do too much (read: be an Acrobat substitute).
Re: Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable
#83No mention of Sumatra PDF[1]? Windows (only), open source, uses MuPDF. [1] https://www.sumatrapdfreader.org/
Ohh, daily driver here. You can configure external apps to open the pdf (in a given page) and choose your hotkey for it, and with some effort, that supercharges the reading. With some scripting and using the grand pymupdf library one can customize it as deeply as one wishes.
Re: Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable
#84What’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.)
Re: Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable
#85Personally 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.
The fact that they called it "portable" document format and now I regularly get PDFs that display "Please open this file in Acrobat" if opened in any other viewer... Great stuff.
Re: Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable
#86There 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…
For me the default alternative to Preview is PDF Expert. It's very zippy and it has the quality of life stuff that other readers leave out, like editing bookmarks.
Re: Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable
#87I want to add in, as I used a ton of JS back when for a GUI that would build prepress ready PDFs and ship em direct to giant xerox printers for a company called Copy General - the early days of on demand printing.
The pdf format was awesome broad shift for the early digital printers and has been a nice standard for a long time.
Adobe uses Acrobat as leverage in this game. Reader is the public’s only peephole and they have famously kept the features lean.
Re: Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable
#88Personally 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.
The fact that they called it "portable" document format and now I regularly get PDFs that display "Please open this file in Acrobat" if opened in any other viewer... Great stuff.
Wait, this actually happens?
Re: Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable
#89Preview.app is actually one of the few first-party Apple apps that I really miss when using a non-macOS computer.
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.
Yeah, I've been very happy with it over the years. But my one minor nit-pick is that it uses a _lot_ of memory. I presume it is pre-rendering stuff for speed.
On iPhone and iPad I've been using Notability.
Re: Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable
#90Preview.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 iOS rely on PDF encoding for their GUIs now, but I know at one point it was an integral part of the windowing and drawing system and is still in there for processing PDF docs.