Acrobat Is Intrusive, Slow and Non-Customizable

[1] https://www.sumatrapdfreader.org/

Look I know that I probably should not have 200 PDFs open, but Preview should not be consuming 40GB of memory.

Either way, if you want to show off a project, just do so…

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 (although an extremely great document reader in most regards) didn’t let me select an image of my signature, but asked me to either sign on the trackpad with my finger (how do you make that not look like you had nerve damage?) or show a picture of my signature to the webcam of my Mac so it would do extraction on it (which didn’t work at all after 20 minutes of attempting, but also why can’t I just select a photo??). Finally I figured out pdfjs in Firefox recently shipped image-based signing (still waiting on certs)

Of course, I could have edited the PDF in a better editor (GIMP even!), but.. why is such seemingly simple and common PDF work a horror show?

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).

- make fillable forms

- fill out a form, and save/load/save it?

I recall some fillable forms could be opened and filled out on macos, but then they were sort of "finalized" and couldn't be edited once saved.

https://pdfium.googlesource.com/pdfium

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.

https://www.pdf-xchange.com/product/pdf-xchange-editor

There is a free version available during install (not immediately clear from the website), which already can do some things most free PDF viewers can't, like editing text.

At my workplace I've most of the Acrobat software suites for free but cannot be bothered to install them no matter how useful for my workflow because their multitude of software are just bad and resource hungry.

This is a classic pain point, I'm surprised Microsoft or any other companies do not provide better alternative to popular Acrobat software. My take is that designing front-end desktop software are genuinely hard and pay little if you're the second players.

The construction industry is very strange and mostly runs on emailed PDFs (plans, proposals, submittals, etc) and Excel spreadsheets. Sometimes these PDFs are organized in Procore.

I guess I hate Acrobat too, but I virtually never have to use it (except for tax forms, ugh).

I worked on a PDF form that was distributed widely within a Gov department. It would be routinely saved locally and emailed half completed up the managerial chain for sign-off on the request.

It had a lot of dynamic fields so you had to allow it to run macros.

The first thing it did was check the version of the just opened form and replace it with the latest PDF from the department's server.

It also had save/resume functionality which would only work in Acrobat Reader at the time.

Edit: Shout out to Inkscape which I find is a handy replacement for Illustrator and doing minor fixes to PDFs.

My preference by far is qpdfview, but I also use Okular (KDE), Evince, its fork for MATE desktop environment, Atril, and of course xpdf!

When I was researching building a third party pdf reader with super specialized functions, I found that pdf.js might be good alternative that could be used commercially.

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.

I'm all for a good Acrobat alternative though.

What I really want is a PDF editor, with just highlighting functionality, that works like the visual mode.

- Viewing Altium generated schematics, which have some macros that only work in Acrobat.

- Printing stuff. Acrobat print dialog is pretty good.

Its a good start but some issues (on Win10 using the binary from releases) that became pretty apparent right off the bat. I took an instructables page[1], that on Windows I had used 'print to PDF' to print it from Firefox into one long PDF. Using 'j' to scroll down, stops at the end of the page but keeps pretending its going down so you end up down a bunch of virtual lines that don't exist, 'J' will move you to the next page but not to the top of the next page? Two copies of the same file (but from different places, one from the NAS and one from the local disk) open, then neither one of them rendered. The status line suggested they were on different pages but there was nothing on the screen.

That said, it started quickly and time to first page render was fast (with a single file open). I tried it on a more conventional file (datasheet) and again with 'j' or 'k' it moves the page down or up and leave blank space where the page was, neither the next or previous pages are anywhere to be seen until you type 'J' or 'K'. That's a bit unintuitive.

[1] https://www.instructables.com/HackerBox-0110-Synth/