Why Does Everyone Use Adobe Acrobat [Reader]?

+ +

+ 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. +

+ +

+ 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. +

+ +

+ By my senior year I had switched from Windows to Linux full-time and it + was then I found out about MuPDF 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. +

+ +

+ 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 + mutool, 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. +

+ +

+ 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. +

+ +

+ 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. +