diff options
Diffstat (limited to 'drafts/why does everyone insist on using adobe acrobat?.html')
| -rw-r--r-- | drafts/why does everyone insist on using adobe acrobat?.html | 69 |
1 files changed, 0 insertions, 69 deletions
diff --git a/drafts/why does everyone insist on using adobe acrobat?.html b/drafts/why does everyone insist on using adobe acrobat?.html deleted file mode 100644 index c2a5504..0000000 --- a/drafts/why does everyone insist on using adobe acrobat?.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,69 +0,0 @@ -<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> |