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authorAdam T. Carpenter <atc@53hor.net>2021-04-21 22:57:39 -0400
committerAdam T. Carpenter <atc@53hor.net>2021-04-21 22:57:39 -0400
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+ <article>
+ <h1>Why Does Everyone Use Adobe Acrobat [Reader]?</h1>
+
+ <p>
+ <img
+ src="https://nextcloud.53hor.net/index.php/s/Pq8ZPe8THoH3Eoo/preview"
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+ </p>
+
+ <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>
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+</html>