[behnamoh]

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.

[perching_aix]

> 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).

[egypturnash]

I have a plugin for Illustrator that has several options for helping to make sure your file gets saved regularly. I have it configured to just pop up a polite little warning after fifteen minutes of unsaved work.

Sometimes it grabs focus from whatever I'm doing in Illustrator and this is indeed slightly annoying but it is also useful since I want it to interrupt whatever I'm doing and make me ask myself if I am at a good place to save, and if I'm not, then to save as soon as I am.

Arguably this is still annoying but it is an annoyance I have explicitly asked for, knowing it'll be annoying.

[diggan]

> Are pop-ups ever not annoying? :)

Pressing space to "preview" a file in Finder on macOS is pretty much "non-annoying popup", since you actually want it :)

[wtallis]

Consider how some developers today talk about "toast" notifications: they understand on some level that calling them pop-ups is bad, but came to a consensus that using a different name was appropriate, rather than not actually making pop-ups in the first place.

[netsharc]

Theme Hospital (a funny 90's game) had a cool way to do notifications, watch on the bottom left as icons pop up: https://youtu.be/26O35BOTVSI?t=693

Some disappear if left unclicked, I guess if the problem is no longer relevant (e.g. a patient bored of waiting leaves), and they can be attended to in any order.

[alexthehurst]

But aren’t toasts fundamentally different by being intentionally designed not to block your work?

[wtallis]

Pop-up ads from the dark ages of the web largely weren't modal dialog boxes. For the most part, clicking to dismiss them, or clicking to bring the window you cared about back to the foreground was at least as easy as getting rid of "toast" style pop-ups. Both are intentionally distracting, neither is blocking in the sense of preventing you from continuing to interact with the window they partially obscure.

[eviks]

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?

[ponector]

>> I basically cannot come up with a situation where popups are actually an unavoidable and proper good choice

How about pop-up with 2fa request? Better to have pop-up for push notification than to look for auth app by yourself.

[IChrisI]

"Are you sure you want to close 146 tabs?"

[Timwi]

This is a great example of an unnecessary pop-up. There should just be an obvious way to undo it.

[msephton]

There is, but not everybody will know how to find it. Whereas everybody will see the warning alert.

Personally, I wouldn't call this a popup because this was a result of a user action.

[tines]

> Adobe Reader is the first app I don't install on new machines.

Bravo. Reminds me of that song that goes something like "When your phone doesn't ring, it'll be me."

[hbn]

I listen to a prank call show where one of his recurring bits is to call people who listed used items for sale to let them know that he's not interested in purchasing their item.

[somat]

"People like to tell you why they're not buying things that they never intended to buy in the first place"

-- the techmoan yt channel

[MortyWaves]

Got a link?

[hbn]

Not sure if I can find a particular episode right now that has that type of call but if you look up Phone Losers of America, or The Snow Plow Show (both are the same guy) you can find lots of Craigslist calls.

Here's a similar idea where he pretends to be calling from AT&T to let them know they have no incoming calls:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1sxF6vN3Ho

[MortyWaves]

That’s pretty funny. The UK had something like it called PhoneJackers for a while.

[maxloh]

Adobe Reader (or Acrobat Reader) is still the industry standard for PDF documents, though.

I once found that a PDF file created with OnlyOffice displayed as intended on Chrome, but its embedded font couldn't be recognized or rendered correctly on Acrobat.

I keep Acrobat installed only for verifying the integrity of the PDF files I've created.

[exmadscientist]

What I miss from Acrobat is its Print dialog. Yes, really, the Print dialog. I've had to install the whole bloated mess just to get that dialog.

Why? PDFs are often print-first documents. Sometimes I need to print them. Sometimes my printer needs a little coaxing to get the perfect output. Acrobat's Print dialog has enough capability to do this immediately, no fuss. Others simply don't. If SumatraPDF had the same capabilities instead of just dumping everything onto the cruddy Win95-era system default Print dialog, I don't think I'd ever use anything else.

[amluto]

It never ceases to amaze me that it’s any sort of industry standard any more. It has, by far, the worst implementation of form filling (filling forms on existing PDFs) of any modern PDF viewer I’ve used. Even the paid version is pretty bad.

[eduction]

100%. I recently took a pdf map from a foreign country, rotated it, and. overlaid English notes using macOS preview. I saved and it opened fine in Preview. But when I tried opening the edited map pdf on iOS in the native pdf viewer it was not rotated so the notes were meaningless. Acrobat Reader for iOS opened it correctly.

So ya looking at binary size alone is not useful. Acrobat may be bloated but there also seems to be some robust code there covering edge cases other readers mess up.

[pseudosavant]

I had to have Adobe Reader installed at my last job because there were official federal and state government PDFs we had to work with that only displayed correctly in Adobe Reader. Opening them in anything else, like Chrome, showed a different single page that said to open it in Adobe Reader.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

>Opening them in anything else, like Chrome, showed a different single page that said to open it in Adobe Reader.

So they intentionally broke the documents for anything not Reader?

[exmadscientist]

There are multiple PDF standards. It is possible to rig up documents that display differently depending on which standards are supported. Acrobat is (or at least used to be) the only thing which truly supports them all.

[znpy]

Back in the days of windows xp i fell in love with Foxit Reader. It just opened PDF documents, no fuss.

[pjmlp]

While I share same feelings, I do install it, because I keep getting PDFs that only Acrobat is able to process.

All alternatives always fail short, especially in business context where people get inventive with PDF capabilities.

[ethin]

The only thing I use Adobe Reader/Acrobat for is converting PDFs to text. Literally that's it, and that's only because, for some PDFs, it's much better than pdftotext is.

[robin_reala]

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.

[nottorp]

Not for power users, for governments :)

I keep the official adobe reader around because it's the only way i can sign some crap for the gov.

It's like a virus, I had to remove update daemons and spam daemons and stuff by hand.

Btw the article says it has "AI" now. Where will it send my tax forms?

[ilamont]

I use Preview for signature annotation, joining PDFs, deleting pages, etc. but in some cases it messes up fillable PDFs - fields aren't aligned properly, or certain math functions won't work.

[kevin_thibedeau]

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.

[wildzzz]

There are two big features that Adobe supports that I just don't see common in other readers. First, the schematic capture application I use will generate a PDF of a schematic that has metadata of each component accessible by clicking it. The schematic will show "R179, 100ohms, 0.125W" but clicking to see the metadata will show a part number along with whatever other data the BOM has. No other reader I've used will show this data. Since the schematic PDF serves as our "immutable" copy that goes into our CRM system, it's nice that you have everything you need without having to open Cadence. I believe this is some sort of JavaScript extension to PDF that is likely incredibly exploitable so this is likely why no one else seems to support it (and why Adobe always seems subject to CVEs).

Second, we use Adobe's comments to markup released drawings or other documents for changes. Then both I and QA put our signatures on the PDF and it's either sent to the factory floor for immediate implementation or sent to the document owner for them to incorporate into a new release. Other readers don't always use comments the same way or don't respect the read only attribute that comments and signatures should have.

[vondur]

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.

[diggan]

> 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.

[episteme]

Can’t you just drag and drop across preview windows?

[JKCalhoun]

You can — just drag the thumbnails.

The only downside to this, that I am aware of, is that a new PDF is created (rendered into a new PDF context). That can be lossy in some cases (if there are features that Preview does not support that get "dropped on the floor") and it is possible for the resulting PDF to be larger than the original(s).

[diggan]

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 :)

[wonger_]

qpdf is usually my PDF wrangler of choice:

  qpdf --empty --pages a.pdf 2,3 b.pdf 7-23 -- out.pdf

[mynameismon]

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

[diggan]

> 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 :)

[fooofw]

pdfjam [1] uses a LaTeX package under the hood, is included with the TeX Live distribution and acts as a wrapper for a LaTeX package. With this, I believe your example would be:

    pdfjam PDF_A.pdf '2-3' PDF_B.pdf '7-23' --outfile joined.pdf

I'll admit that I had to look it up but that only took about 3 minutes (it's an example in the readme).

[1] https://github.com/pdfjam/pdfjam

[jbn]

my go-to tool for this is pdftk.

See https://www.pdflabs.com/docs/pdftk-cli-examples/

[D13Fd]

Preview is OK and better than Reader. But PDF Expert is excellent in every way, and is a dramatic improvement on both Adobe Acrobat and Preview. It’s so weird that they won’t release a PC version.

[staticman2]

Sometimes Mac users need to communicate with Non Mac users and it's helpful to be using the same PDF reader software so you know what you send them is the same as what they'll see.

[insane_dreamer]

Love Preview but it doesn’t work with all PDFs. I still have to switch to Acrobat regularly.

[behnamoh]

You're right, why would anyone use Adobe Reader instead of the built-in Preview on Mac? Though Preview has its own limitations.

[JKCalhoun]

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).

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

About 1 in 15 of the pdfs I view in Preview have some sort of "corrupt jpeg" artifacting on the first page. (These are scans of old books, magazines, typically.) There will be a diagonal staircase of green blocks, each what I assume is the DCT 8x8 size going all the way down the page, along with what looks like a missing color channel. The same pdf if opened with Firefox will look fine (so pdfjs gets it right). This has gone on for years, something to do with MacOS's own rendering of pdfs (so trivially switching to another app is unlikely to fix it). I have no idea what this is, I can't even think of a good description with which to google the problem...

[JKCalhoun]

Love to see an example PDF. (I'd like to send it to the PDF/ImageIO team at Apple.)

[behnamoh]

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.