Why Does Everyone Use Adobe Acrobat [Reader]?

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- 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. -

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- 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. -

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- 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. -

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- 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. -

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- 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. -

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- 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. -