[HN Gopher] I Hate Acrobat
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I Hate Acrobat
Author : vincent-uden
Score : 44 points
Date : 2025-10-15 21:54 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.vincentuden.xyz)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.vincentuden.xyz)
| Scene_Cast2 wrote:
| Running X11 on WSL is pretty easy and pain-free these days. The
| author could hypothetically run Zathura through that setup in a
| pinch.
|
| I'm all for a good Acrobat alternative though.
| clickety_clack wrote:
| 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.
| gdulli wrote:
| Firefox has never failed me for this. It's great not needing a
| separate program at all.
| itopaloglu83 wrote:
| Acrobat also installs this weird service that tries to upload
| all the pdf files you open, regardless of what you do, you
| cannot shut it down or disable.
|
| I was in charge of the electronic document management system of
| a university, and kept having issues with deleting pdf files
| after opening them. The error said the files were still in use,
| and exiting Acrobat didn't solve the issue either. Apparently,
| the background service keeps the file open to upload it, and I
| had to forcefully close open files just to delete pdf files.
|
| Acrobat is abusing a standard, portable document format, and
| trying to become synonymous with it, despite being very hostile
| against users.
| elorant wrote:
| I hate pretty much everything from Adobe. I treat all their
| software as malware since it's counter intuitive and consumes too
| much resources. Thank God i'm not an artist/design who has to
| work with their products daily.
| Gualdrapo wrote:
| And even if you were you could manage to earn a living without
| using Adobe stuff. Ask David Revoy, for example.
|
| https://www.davidrevoy.com/static2/about-me
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| No mention of Sumatra PDF[1]? Windows (only), open source, uses
| MuPDF.
|
| [1] https://www.sumatrapdfreader.org/
| zamadatix wrote:
| I had to ctrl+f the blogpost after reading because I couldn't
| believe they ended it without even a mention of SumatraPDF!
|
| What a great PDF reader. kjksf, thank you!
| globalnode wrote:
| ok thank you so much... finally an open source pdf reader thats
| not acrobat that works (hopefully, still testing)
| porphyra wrote:
| In my experience, the best tool to edit PDFs is Master PDF
| Editor. The older version 4 is even freely available in the arch
| user repository:
| https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/masterpdfeditor-free
| karsa_orlong wrote:
| I recommend sioyek if you need some highlighting functionality
| which is absent in zathura. Moreover, Xournal++ is also pretty
| good for editing.
|
| What I really want is a PDF editor, with just highlighting
| functionality, that works like the visual mode.
| adamnemecek wrote:
| What I hate about Preview on macOS is that all opened PDFs are
| kept in memory as opposed to freeing up the memory when the PDF
| is not active.
|
| Look I know that I probably should not have 200 PDFs open, but
| Preview should not be consuming 40GB of memory.
| asdff wrote:
| How about the fact they charge $25/mo for acrobat
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| Adobe is trash, bloated, over-priced software that is mostly DRM.
| Paying customer? Adobe hates you, but not your money.
| munk-a wrote:
| Like a lot of enterprise software companies - their customers
| aren't their end users so a lot of their incentives aren't
| actually aligned to produce a good UX.
| gdevenyi wrote:
| No mention of Okular from KDE.
| lurk2 wrote:
| I installed it a while ago based on recommendations I saw here.
| It works far better than Acrobat ever did. Deleting all of the
| Adobe files off of my computer felt great.
| nipperkinfeet wrote:
| We all do. There are many amazing alternatives nowadays. No need
| for any Adobe products.
| superkuh wrote:
| PDF is no longer a single format. You have to specify what type
| of PDF. Many will not open in anything but Acrobat.
|
| For example the Wisconsin state dept. of natural resources
| converted nearly all of their permit/form PDFs to "Dynamic XFA
| (XML Form Architecture) PDF". Which is basically a PDF without
| content that pulls down all it's content from the web. It even
| still, ostensibly, supports Flash (swf) animations. But when I
| try to open those permit form PDFs in any other viewer but
| Acrobat I get,
|
| >"Please wait... If this message is not eventually replaced by
| the proper contents of the document, your PDF viewer may not be
| able to display this type of document. You can upgrade to the
| latest version of Adobe Reader for Windows(r), Mac, or Linux(r)
| by visiting http://www.adobe.com/go/reader_download. For more
| assistance with Adobe Reader visit
| http://www.adobe.com/go/acrreader. Windows is either a
| registered trademark or a trademark of Microsoft Corporation in
| the United States and/or other countries. Mac is a trademark of
| Apple Inc., registered in the United States and other
| countries. Linux is the registered trademark of Linus Torvalds
| in the U.S. and other countries." -
| https://dnr.wi.gov/files/PDF/forms/9400/9400-280.pdf
|
| PDF is supposed to be the format that looks the same everywhere
| all the time. But these "PDF" completely and miserably fail at
| that.
| glkindlmann wrote:
| Thank you for giving the specific name ("Dynamic XFA (XML
| Form Architecture)") to the kind of PDF that generates the
| "Please wait" message. I have seen this and never understood
| how it arises. Chuck Geschke spins in his grave ...
| skydhash wrote:
| That would be one of the reasons I'd have a dedicated
| computer that I power on for these kinds of things. Better
| than suffer bad software all the times.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| Apple Preview does mostly everything you could want to do with a
| PDF. Supports unlocking encrypted PDFs, form filling, and even
| page rotation. (A feature which Adobe charges for.)
| OGEnthusiast wrote:
| Preview.app is actually one of the few first-party Apple apps
| that I really miss when using a non-macOS computer.
| benjaminclauss wrote:
| and now on iPad... finally
| treetalker wrote:
| I use the free version of PDF Expert on all my Apple devices, and
| it's pretty great. (I use it for heavy-duty highlighting and
| annotation, document creation/merging, creation of tables of
| contents, as well as handling large pdfs -- appellate case
| records, briefs, etc.) I'm especially fond of how it works on my
| enormous iPad Pro with the Apple Pencil: almost as good as, and
| in many ways better than, working with real paper and pencil.
| neilv wrote:
| > _On linux there is (at least) one non-bad PDF reader. Zathura
| is amazing with the MuPDF backend._
|
| Obviously, Linux has the showstopper of being a non-abusive, non-
| proprietary software platform.
|
| Who needs that nonsense, when the problem we're trying to solve
| is abusive, proprietary software.
| bix6 wrote:
| What are people using as a free PDF editor for business use /
| non-technical people? Whenever we try anything else we inevitably
| run into something we need acrobat for.
| observationist wrote:
| I have grok produce a precise transcription of the text, then
| have chatgpt produce an editable word document, including
| forms, following the text that grok picked up (it's a lot
| better at OCR, for some reason)
|
| And then if I need to produce another pdf, I export it from
| Word.
|
| PDFs are silly. It's tech superstition, kinda like the belief
| that faxes are secure.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| Acrobat 9.0
| crazygringo wrote:
| One of my favorite things about macOS is that it comes with
| Preview. It's clean and lightning-fast for viewing and annotating
| PDFs. PDF support feels like it's just part of the OS because,
| well, it is.
|
| I guess I hate Acrobat too, but I virtually never have to use
| (except for taxes).
| stefanos82 wrote:
| As a GNU / Linux Debian user, I personally use many different PDF
| readers for eccentric reasons lol!
|
| My preference by far is qpdfview, but I also use Okular (KDE),
| Evince, its fork for MATE desktop environment, Atril, and of
| course xpdf!
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