php site, templating and partials, faster index generation

1 files changed, 84 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/posts/2020-12-22-why-does-everyone-use-adobe-acrobat-reader.php b/posts/2020-12-22-why-does-everyone-use-adobe-acrobat-reader.php
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..bb384f2
--- /dev/null
+++ b/posts/2020-12-22-why-does-everyone-use-adobe-acrobat-reader.php
@@ -0,0 +1,84 @@
+<?php
+$title = "Why Does Everyone Use Adobe Acrobat [Reader]?";
+if (isset($early) && $early) {
+	return;
+}
+include($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . '/includes/head.php');
+?>
+
+<p>
+	<img src="https://nextcloud.53hor.net/index.php/s/Pq8ZPe8THoH3Eoo/preview" />
+</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>