[funktour]

There are a surprising number of Preview defenders here. You guys must have never had to open a 500+ page document, because for me, that's an all-but guaranteed way to make Preview crash. Preview is only best because the major alternatives (Acrobat) suck more.

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).

[the-mitr]

I used preview to annotate pdf for copyediting. It was modest 100 page text only doc. After about 70 pages or so preview crashed and the file became corrupted with no way to recover the annotation or comments. Never used preview for annotation there after. But as a viewer is good

[sharma-arjun]

Skim is amazing, I've never had it crash on large documents or with keyword searches as Preview almost always does. Also has a great note-taking system for scientific / academic work. Not sure why it flies under the radar so much.

[gsinclair]

I’ve had Skim crash on me several times. I still like it though.

[dunham]

I haven't had it crash. Typically my documents are under a 300 pages (either academic books or papers), but occasionally I use the PDF reference, which is 1300 pages.

[crooked-v]

For me the default alternative to Preview is PDF Expert. It's very zippy and it has the quality of life stuff that other readers leave out, like editing bookmarks.