[clickety_clack]

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.

[itopaloglu83]

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.

[dylan604]

> Acrobat is abusing a standard, portable document format, and trying to become synonymous with it, despite being very hostile against users

What? They're just extending the portability by uploading the files to the cloud so you can view them from anywhere! /s

I'm assuming/hoping that's all it is in whatever this uploading is. Did you find out why it was uploading files, and more importantly, where?

[itopaloglu83]

We didn't have the subscription, and there was no option to upload documents, or any information in the app preferences as to what was happening at all.

So, we couldn't find any information why it was happening, except after our complain and an update later, the background service started closing files when the Adobe app was exited.

We had tens of thousands of applicant documents, most of them contained personally identifiable information (PII) about future students, those files should not be even stored locally, except for the protected PII storage, yet along being uploaded to a random S3 bucket somewhere to be stolen by hackers.

If you're using Windows and have Adobe installed, just check your running programs and on top you'll see that weird Adobe service that you cannot disable even if you turn off its auto-start feature. Acrobat reader is supposed to be a PDF viewer, why does it even have a background service for f.ck sake.

[hulitu]

> Did you find out why it was uploading files, and more importantly, where?

Why ? PRISM. Where ? Who cares.

[gdulli]

Firefox has never failed me for this. It's great not needing a separate program at all.

[noahmasur]

Some tax forms like NY State fill-in forms have some scripted functionality that requires Adobe Acrobat to work, and they block rendering from other PDF programs. Even worse, once you've filled in the form, their PDF then blocks Acrobat from exporting to a normal PDF (the way you can save a print preview to a PDF for later) and so the only way you can get a real PDF of it is to print it directly and then scan it back to your computer.

[Benanov]

stupidly does it block the Microsoft XPS printer?

[clickety_clack]

I never had any problems with the Mac preview app before either, until these specific forms required something specifically from acrobat.