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authorAdam T. Carpenter <atc@53hor.net>2020-12-22 08:30:07 -0500
committerAdam T. Carpenter <atc@53hor.net>2020-12-22 08:30:07 -0500
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+<h1>Why Does Everyone Use Adobe Acrobat [Reader]?</h1>
+
+<p>
+ This is something that I've never been able to figure out. All through high
+ school I had to use PDFs. And if you wanted to open a PDF, everyone understood
+ that you needed Adobe Acrobat Reader. Even web sites where you downloaded PDFs
+ insisted that in order to open them, you were going to have to follow a
+ download link to make sure you have Acrobat on your PC.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+ Fast-forward a few years into college and I'm using PDFs more than ever. Every
+ professor ever is scanning and uploading course material, so out comes Acrobat
+ Reader for literally every teacher and student. At this point I was actually
+ used to using Firefox (PDF.js) to view PDFs for a couple of reasons. First of
+ all, Firefox usually opened PDFs faster than Acrobat Reader did. Reader was
+ getting bigger with every release, and eventually had a monstrous UI to load
+ up every time I wanted to open a tiny PDF file. Second, Firefox had smooth
+ scrolling for page-width documents. Reader was getting slower and laggier with
+ each release, to the point where scrolling through a PDF was no longer buttery
+ smooth but jittery and stuttery. It also seemed like Reader purposefully
+ wouldn't slide the page when you used a mouse wheel. It would jump down a few
+ lines at a time like it was simulating the down arrow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+ By my senior year I had switched from Windows to Linux full-time and it was
+ then I found out about <a href="https://mupdf.com/">MuPDF</a> and from then on
+ things were never the same. It's literally the best PDF reader I've ever used,
+ and I tried out quite a few. There are desktop and mobile apps. It opens
+ almost instantly. It lets you easily resize the page with excellent keyboard
+ shortcuts. There are no giant menu bars on either side of the page to squish
+ the document down to an unreadable size. Having a dozen of them open at once
+ doesn't bog down my PC. It's also available for all of the relevant operating
+ systems I've used (Windows, Mac OS, Linux, FreeBSD)! Oh and password-protected
+ PDFs are supported as well.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+ It's a fantastic piece of software And the best part is it comes with a
+ variety of tools to edit and manipulate PDFs as well. If the folks I went to
+ school with thought you needed the free Acrobat Reader to view a PDF, they
+ sure as heck thought you needed to buy Acrobat Pro to edit one. Some of them
+ refused to pay for it and used a variety of online services to upload, split
+ or merge, and download PDFs. I honestly for the life of me can't understand
+ why. MuPDF comes with <code>mutool</code>, which does all of the things I
+ would ever need to do with a PDF. It can attempt to convert a PDF to other
+ formats, like HTML. It can split and combine documents. It can even create
+ them from scratch and sign them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+ It's also free and open source. Can you imagine that? PDF viewing and editing
+ being free and open source? It's AGPL (in addition to being commercially)
+ licensed by the creators. The only slight drawback is the desktop version
+ apparently does not yet let you fill out forms. Not sure why but this isn't
+ something I use very frequently.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+ It's not the hottest piece of tech out there, but it just plain works and
+ works really well. Maybe the only reason more people I know don't use it is
+ because Adobe is synonymous with the PDF format. It doesn't seem like that big
+ of a deal, but I feel like Acrobat has always been a piece of software that
+ has frustrated new or infrequent users in computing. And that's just not good.
+ Maybe the barrier to using MuPDF is the lack of GUI and abundance of
+ keybindings, but for me that's no sweat. I'd say to anyone to just try it out
+ and see if they like it. It is free, after all.
+</p>