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author53hornet <atc@53hor.net>2021-07-28 10:58:58 -0400
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- <h1>Why Does Everyone Use Adobe Acrobat [Reader]?</h1>
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- <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.
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