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).
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).
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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:
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.
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.
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).
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.
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...
Ads and many online features can be removed before installation of Adobe Reader by customizing the installer using the Adobe Reader Customization Wizard for Windows [1], where there is an optional labeled "Disable Upsell" [2]. There might also be a version for macOS [3]. It might also just be possible to just directly set the appropriate "FeatureLockDown" options in the registry/preferences in your system [4].
At this point i don’t trust large programs anymore. Someone recommended to use Lens to manage a k8 cluster. That application was a 600mb install file and if I’m not mistaken double that after installing on a Mac. Desktop software has become so crazy. Meanwhile the blender download is 300mb.
It is not that I’m looking for over optimized software. But a 2gb k8 console doesn’t spark trust in the developers to begin with.
It's not much better on mobile. I just checked a few apps on my iPhone: Instagram, TikTok, Duolingo are all about 500mb each. And many of these apps are gigabytes when you use them for a bit and it caches things.
I just cleared Snapchat's cache a few days ago, I barely use the app, and it's somehow taking up 5GB on my phone.
For the purposes of this article, this graph is much more effective at making the point than the log scale one. I think it would have been a better choice to use a graph like this.
For the purposes of what this post is communicating, I don't think the exact sizes of adobe prior to 2000 or the exact size of sumatrapdf matters at all.
The linear graph instantly communicates:
- sumatrapdf has barely changed size in the same time that adobe's size has grown exponentially
- adobe's crazy growth spike started ~6 years ago
Maybe I'm just dumb, but I didn't realize the graph had a log y-axis at first. Then, once I realized that, I had to spend a bit of time parsing the graph to figure out what it was saying (I don't work with log graphs often at all). And once that was done, the only thing I came away with was "wow, adobe grew a hell of a lot when sumatra didnt", which is the same thing the linear graph told me instantly.
Being able to see that sumatras size remains relatively flat while adobes size growth is practically vertical is all the granularity I care about at a glance. If I want to know exact sizes, I'll dive in deeper.
I think this is an argument for the log scale. I'd argue that the things you say it communicates are not actually correct.
Adobe's size has been growing exponentially pretty much this whole time. The rate increased slightly in the mid-2010s. SumatraPDF started out that way too, but managed to level out after about a decade.
Relative size is what matters here. That increase from ~2.5MB to ~5MB in the mid-90s was pretty significant for the time. In terms of the impact on users, it's probably at least as important if not more so than going from 300MB to 600MB 25-30 years later.
I disagree, am with qualeed on this one. I don’t think the size doubling means much at all except raising the question of why did it double? What was added that I care about? My instinct tells me nothing so it’s shouldn’t really be acceptable except this is par for the course these days. Nobody cares about bandwidth it’s just assumed to be fast and unlimited by nearly every publisher of software.
In the 90s that jump cost me in terms of modem time. I couldn’t download anything else for an extra 30-60 minutes that day (if I remember my speeds correctly). Today, extra 300mb costs me less than a minute and I can easily continue multitasking in the process.
Imagine there had been a 50MB jump in 1998. That would be a major WTF moment. Now imagine a 50MB jump in 2025. We'd barely notice.
Saying Adobe's crazy growth spike started six years ago is just pointing to the knee in the exponential curve. It's had pretty much the same curve since version 1.0. And SumatraPDF had the same exponential growth for quite a while.
If absolute numbers are what matters and an extra 300MB is not important, then why not scale the Y axis to 1TB and squash everything to the bottom?
Thank you! That graph is so much clearer than the one in the article. You can see at a glance the relative size of the two programs, which the logarithmic scale does a terrible job showing.
I'm a technical audience and the logarithmic scale is meaningless to me. So I don't even agree that it's a good choice for a technical audience. It may be a good choice for people who already are used to reading logarithmic scales, but that can't be a particularly large group as it's very rare to see a graph like that.
I looked at the graph first, and misread the version numbers as sizes in megabytes, because that yielded stuff that wasn’t far off matching the curve linearly. “25.1 MB?” I said. “Huh, I’d have expected a lot more than that, but… maybe it’s just ultra compressed? Somehow? Still seems a bit too small. But maybe this article is actually praising Adobe for keeping it down.”
Then Sumatra being 3.something MB seemed possible, for a well-compressed installer.
Ugh, some of these sizes are absurd. I still remember Zoom basically doubling in a single release, as they put a second entire web browser inside the package.
After acquiring Macromedia in 2005, Adobe integrated Flash into several of its products, including Acrobat and Acrobat Reader. This allowed embedded Flash (SWF) content in PDFs, which contributed to increased installer size and complexity. Flash support was eventually removed in the early 2020s after Adobe officially ended support for Flash Player.
Adobe also embedded a JavaScript engine in Acrobat to support interactive PDF features like form validation and automation. Both Flash and JavaScript introduced significant security risks over the years.
While Flash is no longer supported, Acrobat Reader still includes JavaScript functionality, which remains a potential attack surface. In contrast, lightweight PDF readers such as Sumatra do not support JavaScript or Flash, offering a smaller and more secure footprint.
I always found the embedded javascript weird in an ironic sort of way.
There was postscript right, and postscript has a pretty great rendering engine. however the problem is that postscript is too powerful, as a Turing complete language it is hard to use the script results as a document. So adobe used the same rendering engine, tore out the Turing complete bits, added a bunch of structure and ended up with PDF. And the irony... they then proceeded to put the problematic Turing complete bits back in in the form of (spits in disgust) javascript. Hell, if they absolutely needed a scripting language embedded in their document(debatable) they should have put postscript back in.
Tangential, is there any good smooth scrolling PDF viewer (for windows at least), that offers some level of customisation of view? (Like 2 pages side by side, and ideally dark mode and full top to bottom pages with hidden toolbars.)
Adobe Viewer (? not sure of the name) was the only adobe product that had this ability afaik, and while I managed to get an old exe, it's been discontinued unfortunately.
The closest appears to be Xodo PDF with pretty much all features, but it has a ton of popups.
Can it really offer those views? Last time I tried it, it seemed very, err, bare/unpolished. Kinda felt like Arch Linux, I don't doubt it can't do it, but I don't know if I can do it without reading some documentation (no disrespect intended to Arch or Sumatra!)
(I didn't downvote) I legitimately would get a mac, if only I could run my own OS on it easily and if it was reasonably repairable (I don't mind paying high prices for good products.)
...I suppose that's why I got a framework (13) lol
That's some very angry hacker down votes. What's wrong with using the right tool for the job? In another thread I suggested for another poster to sell their Mac and get a PC.
> is there any good smooth scrolling PDF viewer (for windows at least)
Seems like the asker is looking for Windows software in this case. Either way, "Get a Mac (...)" sounds a little unreasonable as a solution for "need a better PDF viewer".
Just my $0.02: I'd presume that if a Mac was a better fit for this commenter then they would have switched over already. For some, the extra attention to detail and improved UX of an Apple device is not worth the extra $$$ compared to an equal spec'd PC. There are also other concerns you are probably aware of.
I am not super familiar with the windows ecosystem but my understanding is that scoop is a package manager similar to choco or nuget correct? is scoop seen as bloated? thanks
The lack of awareness is that the vast majority of users are not aware of and don't use scoop (or probably any package manager) on Windows, especially to install GUI apps, and that doesn't automatically make them "not sane".
This attitude rubs me the wrong way and sadly pollutes the rest of the article. Not understanding that organizations and people all have different needs is such a blind point of view. Not acknowledging winget or chocolatey much less suggesting using them (or gasp, the web site) to be insane is so wrong-headed.
I switched to the Mac in ‘04 or ‘05. One thing that immediately impressed me was Preview, Nd how useful it was for PDFs. No more need for Adobe Reader.
I’m not surprised in the least it’s still bloated and terrible. But I don’t think I would have guessed it was pushing the size of a full CD.
I was pretty shocked by this. I recently bought an old PC laptop to use in my workshop, to run some engine diagnostic software and machine control stuff that doesn't work on Mac. Of course one of the first things it needed was some PDF reading tool so I went for Reader, figuring Adobe's tool would be the least scummy. Installed it and suddenly I was getting McAfee popups? God knows what else it installed along with it. It's horrible. And the shop manual I'm trying to navigate while covered in oil keeps getting obscured by AI popups and ads. F'ing hell.
Maybe I will try this Sumatra thing that the article mentions. I'm coming from Mac where I have Preview built in, and I really don't have the bandwidth to research a goddamned PDF reader. Very disappointed in Adobe.
I'm generally looking at multi kilopage manuals where rapid search and navigation are important, and good zooming for diagrams. I didn't even try a browser as the machine is a bit constrained and I just thought it'd be too slow. But I'll try...
I run into this problem so often that I've been experimenting with rendering all the PDF pages to png images first, and a program that loads all of them on screen at once.
The upside is that it is extremely fast, there is no loading time because all the images are loaded already.
The downside is that it uses an obscene amount of memory. A 500 page manual could run you 8-10Gb of RAM. Also there is no more text highlighting or control-F.
But the fact that even this "works" as well as it does indicates how much worse PDF readers are at this, especially when you get those scanned documents that still have the full images anyways, with lousy or no OCR. They take forever (multiple seconds per page) to load when your in a PDF in chrome and jump somewhere else in the document. Why not go back to image files for those ones to begin with?
I've found Sumatra to be okay at best for PDF compatibility. There are definitely times, heck even in the last week, where PDFs have failed to load or loaded as blank pages. But even then it's still my default.
I have the paid version of Adobe Acrobat. The sheer number of pop-ups in that app is insanely infuriating. It's hard to get any work done. Especially now as they run ads inside it for their "AI" features (which are a paid add-on).
The only difference I’ve noticed is the speed of display; but if you’re reading dense technical content that doesn’t matter much. Adobe Reader is faster if needing to view a lot of pages quickly.
I keep jumping between Preview and Skim.
Preview for simple tasks and editing, Skim for advanced reading (think huge pdfs, where I want to see two parts of the file at the same time).
It's funny that the graph uses logarithmic scaling which makes the increase look much less dramatic than it really is. On the other hand, a lot of stock charts use linear scaling which makes more dramatic than they really are. I think it should be the other way.
Acrobat is broken on all of our company systems. Opens for a few seconds and then crashes. No amount of uninstalling and other tricks will get it to work. Trash software.
Mupdf searches large pdfs much faster. However since I switched to wayland/sway I also use zathura because cut & paste works. Mupdf is an X application but I still use it to search large pdfs. But there is also this plugin but I did not try hard enough to get it running: https://github.com/pwmt/zathura-pdf-mupdf. Under xorg worked cut & paste with mupdf.
because the trend looks linear at a glance, and doesnt really provide a visual representation of the absolute difference in sizes. not to mention its quite rare to see log scale graphs, and many people wont even notice that it is, and leave with the wrong impression
not indicated, and the general idea of dataviz is to communicate clearly. when you have a number, what it represents should be noted, and the units. if I see a number in that context, I assume it's calling out the value displayed.
the x axis is also a bit off, would ideally plot the date of the release and use a proper time axis.
a title is also good to have, maybe a data table.
sorry to be cranky but those who are downvoting , try to be clear, learn some standards, or stay away from publishing charts. you can even ask AI to clean up your code to conform to a standard. Soft skills are important for an engineer. You need to explain the work in clear, persuasive language and dataviz. or you can be, I'm a super-smart engineer, you figure out what I'm trying to say, I don't need to worry about making your eyes bleed. crikey.
after some searching: it seems like you can have a linear quantity in physics or in dimensions when it involves length. for example, the more fence you have, the more length it has. it's a linear quantity because it scales 1:1
outside of that you can have a linear relationship, which is more like: income per hour worked. the more hours you work, the more income you have. and ignoring overtime pay, it's a 1:1 ratio again
i dont believe the graph involves a linear relationship, because the the filesize doesnt increase the same every year. there's no connection between time progressing meaning filesize is inherently bigger. and file size isn't linear quantity because it doesnt involve a length.
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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.
> 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 :)
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?
>> 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.
"Are you sure you want to close 146 tabs?"
This is a great example of an unnecessary pop-up. There should just be an obvious way to undo it.
> 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."
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.
"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
Got a link?
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
That’s pretty funny. The UK had something like it called PhoneJackers for a while.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Can’t you just drag and drop across preview windows?
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).
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 :)
my go-to tool for this is pdftk.
See https://www.pdflabs.com/docs/pdftk-cli-examples/
qpdf is usually my PDF wrangler of choice:
For those who have an installation of LaTeX: It is pretty easy to use LaTeX for this.
> 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 :)
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:
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
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.
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.
Love Preview but it doesn’t work with all PDFs. I still have to switch to Acrobat regularly.
You're right, why would anyone use Adobe Reader instead of the built-in Preview on Mac? Though Preview has its own limitations.
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).
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.
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...
Love to see an example PDF. (I'd like to send it to the PDF/ImageIO team at Apple.)
Back in the days of windows xp i fell in love with Foxit Reader. It just opened PDF documents, no fuss.
Ads and many online features can be removed before installation of Adobe Reader by customizing the installer using the Adobe Reader Customization Wizard for Windows [1], where there is an optional labeled "Disable Upsell" [2]. There might also be a version for macOS [3]. It might also just be possible to just directly set the appropriate "FeatureLockDown" options in the registry/preferences in your system [4].
[1]: https://www.adobe.com/devnet-docs/acrobatetk/tools/Wizard/in...
[2]: https://www.adobe.com/devnet-docs/acrobatetk/tools/Wizard/on...
[3]: https://www.adobe.com/devnet-docs/acrobatetk/tools/AdminGuid...
[4]: https://www.adobe.com/devnet-docs/acrobatetk/tools/PrefRef/W...
Or I install an alternative where I don't have to do this.
At this point i don’t trust large programs anymore. Someone recommended to use Lens to manage a k8 cluster. That application was a 600mb install file and if I’m not mistaken double that after installing on a Mac. Desktop software has become so crazy. Meanwhile the blender download is 300mb. It is not that I’m looking for over optimized software. But a 2gb k8 console doesn’t spark trust in the developers to begin with.
It's not much better on mobile. I just checked a few apps on my iPhone: Instagram, TikTok, Duolingo are all about 500mb each. And many of these apps are gigabytes when you use them for a bit and it caches things.
I just cleared Snapchat's cache a few days ago, I barely use the app, and it's somehow taking up 5GB on my phone.
Just a week ago I reported 37 MB of wasted space in Debian package with Lens https://forums.k8slens.dev/t/debian-package-stores-lima-twic...
They promised to fix this.
You can take a look at k9s: https://k9scli.io/
I miss octant so much. It was really great, it was one of those 80/20 apps.
Nowadays I, unironically, mostly use kubectl. I gave k9s a try but i can't make it stick to me, really...
Note: log scale on the y axis. Current Adobe reader is 83x bigger than current Sumatra according to the chart.
Yes. Log scale seems like a poor choice, given that the point is to show the relative size disparity.
For a technical audience, it’s probably one of the better choices, it’s probably a poor one for mass consumption.
A purely linear graph would absolutely crush their pdf installer and the first 15 years of adobe into a flat line
For reference, here's a version with a linear y-axis: https://imgur.com/a/A2D1puk
For the purposes of this article, this graph is much more effective at making the point than the log scale one. I think it would have been a better choice to use a graph like this.
Thanks!
But you can barely tell the growth of sumatrapdf in the non-logarithmic chart. Same for Adobe Reader before 2000 or so.
For the purposes of what this post is communicating, I don't think the exact sizes of adobe prior to 2000 or the exact size of sumatrapdf matters at all.
The linear graph instantly communicates:
Maybe I'm just dumb, but I didn't realize the graph had a log y-axis at first. Then, once I realized that, I had to spend a bit of time parsing the graph to figure out what it was saying (I don't work with log graphs often at all). And once that was done, the only thing I came away with was "wow, adobe grew a hell of a lot when sumatra didnt", which is the same thing the linear graph told me instantly.Being able to see that sumatras size remains relatively flat while adobes size growth is practically vertical is all the granularity I care about at a glance. If I want to know exact sizes, I'll dive in deeper.
I think this is an argument for the log scale. I'd argue that the things you say it communicates are not actually correct.
Adobe's size has been growing exponentially pretty much this whole time. The rate increased slightly in the mid-2010s. SumatraPDF started out that way too, but managed to level out after about a decade.
Relative size is what matters here. That increase from ~2.5MB to ~5MB in the mid-90s was pretty significant for the time. In terms of the impact on users, it's probably at least as important if not more so than going from 300MB to 600MB 25-30 years later.
>Relative size is what matters here.
This is where our disconnect is. Relative change in size means nothing to me. I care about the absolute size of the final thing I'm installing.
Adobe big, getting bigger. Sumatra small, staying small.
I disagree, am with qualeed on this one. I don’t think the size doubling means much at all except raising the question of why did it double? What was added that I care about? My instinct tells me nothing so it’s shouldn’t really be acceptable except this is par for the course these days. Nobody cares about bandwidth it’s just assumed to be fast and unlimited by nearly every publisher of software.
In the 90s that jump cost me in terms of modem time. I couldn’t download anything else for an extra 30-60 minutes that day (if I remember my speeds correctly). Today, extra 300mb costs me less than a minute and I can easily continue multitasking in the process.
Imagine there had been a 50MB jump in 1998. That would be a major WTF moment. Now imagine a 50MB jump in 2025. We'd barely notice.
Saying Adobe's crazy growth spike started six years ago is just pointing to the knee in the exponential curve. It's had pretty much the same curve since version 1.0. And SumatraPDF had the same exponential growth for quite a while.
If absolute numbers are what matters and an extra 300MB is not important, then why not scale the Y axis to 1TB and squash everything to the bottom?
Thank you! That graph is so much clearer than the one in the article. You can see at a glance the relative size of the two programs, which the logarithmic scale does a terrible job showing.
This makes way more sense if the point was to show how big and bloated Adobe Reader has gotten, and by comparison just how space-efficient Sumatra is.
Way more representative.
I'm a technical audience and the logarithmic scale is meaningless to me. So I don't even agree that it's a good choice for a technical audience. It may be a good choice for people who already are used to reading logarithmic scales, but that can't be a particularly large group as it's very rare to see a graph like that.
I looked at the graph first, and misread the version numbers as sizes in megabytes, because that yielded stuff that wasn’t far off matching the curve linearly. “25.1 MB?” I said. “Huh, I’d have expected a lot more than that, but… maybe it’s just ultra compressed? Somehow? Still seems a bit too small. But maybe this article is actually praising Adobe for keeping it down.”
Then Sumatra being 3.something MB seemed possible, for a well-compressed installer.
Ugh, some of these sizes are absurd. I still remember Zoom basically doubling in a single release, as they put a second entire web browser inside the package.
After acquiring Macromedia in 2005, Adobe integrated Flash into several of its products, including Acrobat and Acrobat Reader. This allowed embedded Flash (SWF) content in PDFs, which contributed to increased installer size and complexity. Flash support was eventually removed in the early 2020s after Adobe officially ended support for Flash Player.
Adobe also embedded a JavaScript engine in Acrobat to support interactive PDF features like form validation and automation. Both Flash and JavaScript introduced significant security risks over the years.
While Flash is no longer supported, Acrobat Reader still includes JavaScript functionality, which remains a potential attack surface. In contrast, lightweight PDF readers such as Sumatra do not support JavaScript or Flash, offering a smaller and more secure footprint.
I always found the embedded javascript weird in an ironic sort of way.
There was postscript right, and postscript has a pretty great rendering engine. however the problem is that postscript is too powerful, as a Turing complete language it is hard to use the script results as a document. So adobe used the same rendering engine, tore out the Turing complete bits, added a bunch of structure and ended up with PDF. And the irony... they then proceeded to put the problematic Turing complete bits back in in the form of (spits in disgust) javascript. Hell, if they absolutely needed a scripting language embedded in their document(debatable) they should have put postscript back in.
Tangential, is there any good smooth scrolling PDF viewer (for windows at least), that offers some level of customisation of view? (Like 2 pages side by side, and ideally dark mode and full top to bottom pages with hidden toolbars.)
Adobe Viewer (? not sure of the name) was the only adobe product that had this ability afaik, and while I managed to get an old exe, it's been discontinued unfortunately.
The closest appears to be Xodo PDF with pretty much all features, but it has a ton of popups.
Maybe Sumatra PDF?
Can it really offer those views? Last time I tried it, it seemed very, err, bare/unpolished. Kinda felt like Arch Linux, I don't doubt it can't do it, but I don't know if I can do it without reading some documentation (no disrespect intended to Arch or Sumatra!)
Sumatra can do side by side with or without a cover page but I don't think you can do a frameless UI and the dark theme is a bit fugly.
It is a fairly mature program, it's just that the developer decided to maximize on "small" and "fast" at the expense of other things.
Maybe Okular can be tweaked this way
Thanks, I think I had tried it in the past, I'll check it out again
Get a Mac and use Preview
(I didn't downvote) I legitimately would get a mac, if only I could run my own OS on it easily and if it was reasonably repairable (I don't mind paying high prices for good products.)
...I suppose that's why I got a framework (13) lol
That's some very angry hacker down votes. What's wrong with using the right tool for the job? In another thread I suggested for another poster to sell their Mac and get a PC.
> is there any good smooth scrolling PDF viewer (for windows at least)
Seems like the asker is looking for Windows software in this case. Either way, "Get a Mac (...)" sounds a little unreasonable as a solution for "need a better PDF viewer".
Just my $0.02: I'd presume that if a Mac was a better fit for this commenter then they would have switched over already. For some, the extra attention to detail and improved UX of an Apple device is not worth the extra $$$ compared to an equal spec'd PC. There are also other concerns you are probably aware of.
> for anyone sane would install it via scoop anyway
The lack of awareness here is mind-blowing.
Good post otherwise. Great graph.
I am not super familiar with the windows ecosystem but my understanding is that scoop is a package manager similar to choco or nuget correct? is scoop seen as bloated? thanks
The lack of awareness is that the vast majority of users are not aware of and don't use scoop (or probably any package manager) on Windows, especially to install GUI apps, and that doesn't automatically make them "not sane".
Even if someone uses a package manager, they probably use choco. I'd never even heard of scoop before reading this article.
choco needs admin rights, something corporate minions, as me, does not always have.
scoop works always as user.
scoop is fine since it keeps itself confined to user profile, unlike some other package managers.
Doesn't winget prefer to respect the package source's intention?
This attitude rubs me the wrong way and sadly pollutes the rest of the article. Not understanding that organizations and people all have different needs is such a blind point of view. Not acknowledging winget or chocolatey much less suggesting using them (or gasp, the web site) to be insane is so wrong-headed.
Worst part is the browsers are now better anyway at filling in forms and signing etc while adobe crap tries to upsell you for that
Yes. I don't when it happened exactly, but Chrome does a great job.
I remember trying a year or so ago and it couldn't. Or badly.
I switched to the Mac in ‘04 or ‘05. One thing that immediately impressed me was Preview, Nd how useful it was for PDFs. No more need for Adobe Reader.
I’m not surprised in the least it’s still bloated and terrible. But I don’t think I would have guessed it was pushing the size of a full CD.
What a joke.
I was pretty shocked by this. I recently bought an old PC laptop to use in my workshop, to run some engine diagnostic software and machine control stuff that doesn't work on Mac. Of course one of the first things it needed was some PDF reading tool so I went for Reader, figuring Adobe's tool would be the least scummy. Installed it and suddenly I was getting McAfee popups? God knows what else it installed along with it. It's horrible. And the shop manual I'm trying to navigate while covered in oil keeps getting obscured by AI popups and ads. F'ing hell.
Maybe I will try this Sumatra thing that the article mentions. I'm coming from Mac where I have Preview built in, and I really don't have the bandwidth to research a goddamned PDF reader. Very disappointed in Adobe.
All browsers open PDF files really well and sometimes better than Acrobat. Just need Chrome, Firefox, Edge, etc.
I'm generally looking at multi kilopage manuals where rapid search and navigation are important, and good zooming for diagrams. I didn't even try a browser as the machine is a bit constrained and I just thought it'd be too slow. But I'll try...
I run into this problem so often that I've been experimenting with rendering all the PDF pages to png images first, and a program that loads all of them on screen at once.
The upside is that it is extremely fast, there is no loading time because all the images are loaded already.
The downside is that it uses an obscene amount of memory. A 500 page manual could run you 8-10Gb of RAM. Also there is no more text highlighting or control-F.
But the fact that even this "works" as well as it does indicates how much worse PDF readers are at this, especially when you get those scanned documents that still have the full images anyways, with lousy or no OCR. They take forever (multiple seconds per page) to load when your in a PDF in chrome and jump somewhere else in the document. Why not go back to image files for those ones to begin with?
I've found Sumatra to be okay at best for PDF compatibility. There are definitely times, heck even in the last week, where PDFs have failed to load or loaded as blank pages. But even then it's still my default.
Literally the same. Went to deploy a Windows 7 laptop for some Motorola software and documentation and went to download the latest Reader executable.
I was shocked when the offered executable for Windows 7 was the 600MB+ release and ended up dumping it for SumatraPDF myself.
8 MB is so much nicer than 600, especially on a laptop with only 1GB of RAM.
I have the paid version of Adobe Acrobat. The sheer number of pop-ups in that app is insanely infuriating. It's hard to get any work done. Especially now as they run ads inside it for their "AI" features (which are a paid add-on).
The only difference I’ve noticed is the speed of display; but if you’re reading dense technical content that doesn’t matter much. Adobe Reader is faster if needing to view a lot of pages quickly.
Faster than what?
Faster than browser based PDF display; I haven’t done head to head testing against muPDF or Zathura however.
What’s the best choice of free desktop PDF Viewer/Editor these days (any OS)?
On Windows I’ve been using PDF-XChange for a decade or so now, but curious if better alternatives have cropped up.
I keep jumping between Preview and Skim. Preview for simple tasks and editing, Skim for advanced reading (think huge pdfs, where I want to see two parts of the file at the same time).
It's funny that the graph uses logarithmic scaling which makes the increase look much less dramatic than it really is. On the other hand, a lot of stock charts use linear scaling which makes more dramatic than they really are. I think it should be the other way.
Which tools are capable of filling in a PDF form that has javascript?
Acrobat is broken on all of our company systems. Opens for a few seconds and then crashes. No amount of uninstalling and other tricks will get it to work. Trash software.
Log scale makes you miss how bad it is.
I'd really like to see that graph in linear scale!
Meanwhile...
> apt show zathura | grep Size
Installed-Size: 1,018 kB Download-Size: 224 kB
I use xpdf or evince. Never ran into a PDF that one of those couldn't handle. My needs are simple though.
My favorite PDF reader currently. It's limited, but faster than anything I've tried.
Mupdf searches large pdfs much faster. However since I switched to wayland/sway I also use zathura because cut & paste works. Mupdf is an X application but I still use it to search large pdfs. But there is also this plugin but I did not try hard enough to get it running: https://github.com/pwmt/zathura-pdf-mupdf. Under xorg worked cut & paste with mupdf.
That's not a fair comparison as you need a bunch of dependencies to actually render stuff. On my system zathura-pdf-mupdf alone is 24M.
Every once in a while I have to update a Samsung app and see that the update is 110Mb.
Not a big deal in a nation with 5G coverage but when I am on holiday somewhere in the boonies I realise how we take it all for granted.
Why don't the labels on the points match the scale?
Looks like a chart crime scene
And the log scale makes this a contender for https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisugly/
What's wrong with the log scale? IMO it's a good use of it since the size of the installer grew exponentially over time.
because the trend looks linear at a glance, and doesnt really provide a visual representation of the absolute difference in sizes. not to mention its quite rare to see log scale graphs, and many people wont even notice that it is, and leave with the wrong impression
You're looking at the software version number I think. But yes, it's confusing
The labels on the points are version numbers.
ok, that makes sense.
not indicated, and the general idea of dataviz is to communicate clearly. when you have a number, what it represents should be noted, and the units. if I see a number in that context, I assume it's calling out the value displayed.
the x axis is also a bit off, would ideally plot the date of the release and use a proper time axis.
a title is also good to have, maybe a data table.
sorry to be cranky but those who are downvoting , try to be clear, learn some standards, or stay away from publishing charts. you can even ask AI to clean up your code to conform to a standard. Soft skills are important for an engineer. You need to explain the work in clear, persuasive language and dataviz. or you can be, I'm a super-smart engineer, you figure out what I'm trying to say, I don't need to worry about making your eyes bleed. crikey.
https://www.datavizstyleguide.com/
https://www.amazon.com/Better-Data-Visualizations-Scholars-R...
https://guides.library.jhu.edu/datavisualization/scientific
https://github.com/rougier/scientific-visualization-book
>Soft skills are important for an engineer.
Personally, I'm a bit nitpicky about capitalization and punctuation. I guess everybody's got their hobby-horse to ride.
Log y axis is certainly a choice for comparing two linear quantities
doesn't it looking straight (ish) on a log axis mean it's an exponential relationship, not linear?
The quantity (file size) is a linear one
What does it mean for a quantity to be linear?
I would guess that it gets bigger in only one dimension
after some searching: it seems like you can have a linear quantity in physics or in dimensions when it involves length. for example, the more fence you have, the more length it has. it's a linear quantity because it scales 1:1
outside of that you can have a linear relationship, which is more like: income per hour worked. the more hours you work, the more income you have. and ignoring overtime pay, it's a 1:1 ratio again
i dont believe the graph involves a linear relationship, because the the filesize doesnt increase the same every year. there's no connection between time progressing meaning filesize is inherently bigger. and file size isn't linear quantity because it doesnt involve a length.
What does it mean for a quantity to be linear?
edit: I'm late...
Now add the cost per gigabyte of storage and average internet speed to the graph.
And app load times and page render times. Man, this could be the one chart that sums it all up.
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