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.
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.
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.)
Preview is genuinely very good, but it doesn’t handle annotations made in Acrobat very well. When navigating between annotations, they can become stuck open in Preview, and it is not possible to view insertions.
Whether that is the fault of Acrobat or Preview, I’m not sure. Unfortunately, though, it means I frequently need to move across to Acrobat when addressing edits that someone has marked up in that software. And that acts as a constant reminder of how sluggish, awkward and nagging Acrobat can be. Even quitting the app is slow!
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.
What are people using as a free (edit: or lifetime license) PDF editor for business use / non-technical people? Whenever we try anything else we inevitably run into something we need acrobat for.
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 it (except for tax forms, ugh).
My company provides me with the top tier license for Bluebeam Revu, an amazing PDF editor geared towards the construction industry. It handles everything you can think of flawlessly, it can extract PDF tables into Excel spreadsheets, markups of all kinds, measuring, counting, resizing; adding, removing extracting, and collating sheets, pasting in photos from the clipboard, and so much more. It’s the best piece of software I use at work, and I’m thankful for it every day.
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 haven't really ever had issues with Evince. I don't know that my requirements have that advanced, but it does auto-updates when I write Typst or LaTeX, which is the thing I primarily care about.
A month ago, I opened an old PDF file on MacOS Monterey and found that Preview couldn't display the images in it. Chrome browser on Monterey shows inlined images. I've read this PDF on Windows for years. For Monterey I had to convert it with some online converter in order to watch inlined images.
My favorite "the worst PDF reader" is MacOS Preview.
Acrobat Reader lets you do a lot of potentially bad things with ActiveScript in a PDF once the user allows it.
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.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 74.7 ms ] threadI'm all for a good Acrobat alternative though.
[1] https://www.sumatrapdfreader.org/
What I really want is a PDF editor, with just highlighting functionality, that works like the visual mode.
Look I know that I probably should not have 200 PDFs open, but Preview should not be consuming 40GB of memory.
Whether that is the fault of Acrobat or Preview, I’m not sure. Unfortunately, though, it means I frequently need to move across to Acrobat when addressing edits that someone has marked up in that software. And that acts as a constant reminder of how sluggish, awkward and nagging Acrobat can be. Even quitting the app is slow!
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 guess I hate Acrobat too, but I virtually never have to use it (except for tax forms, ugh).
My preference by far is qpdfview, but I also use Okular (KDE), Evince, its fork for MATE desktop environment, Atril, and of course xpdf!
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.
Half my org still uses Outlook classic and even it's laughably unstable.
My favorite "the worst PDF reader" is MacOS Preview.
Hm. I hate Acrobat but it is still the best pdf program on Windows.
pdf.js is a parody if you have more than 3 pages.
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.