- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Reader would work for like 90% of people, but no, everyone needs Standard or Pro because reasons.
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What would motivate someone to insist on having software he doesn’t use?
They use it, just not to its full capability.
I bet zero people use any software to its full capability.
While true, the point is that the free version covers their use case and the additional features in the paid version are not used at all.
Most regular users know where the buttons they need for there job are, that’s it.
You dare give them a different layout of the same buttons, and they will swear up and down the buttons are not there or don’t work.
Chrome PDF viewer insists it now Windows default? Clearly that means the one they regularly use has gotten taken over by a virus, and they can’t find “the button” to do “the thing” that they need to do to these PDFs every week.
You dare give them a different layout of the same buttons, and they will swear up and down the buttons are not there or don’t work.
Me cursing silently because there’s another unnecessary UI change that hides some things in more sub-menus or changes icons for no apparent reason, now trying to find ways to customize my experience instead of doing any actual work
It’s also a kind of ego thing for some people, if they know a coworker has something then they want it too. Especially if it was expensive. When Parallels came out for MacOS it became fashionable at my work to have a full Windows setup on employer-issued Macs and everyone started demanding it. When they eventually looked at usage it turned out all those people demanding it never actually did anything with it.
You tell me. I regularly have to sweep our org for unused licences of Acrobat, Visio, Project, AutoCAD and Bluebeam.
Half the time they just wanted to read one file but when you ask them when they put in the request they were apparently our next super engineer.
Foxit was good several years ago - no clue about recently
I saved the last version before they took out the pdf printer. Still not an editor. Used bluebeam for that. Though that was also bought out and being run into the ground.
It’s just as garbage nonsenseware as Adobe. I installed it recently on my friend’s PC and holy shit, whatever happened to that small program. It went to the bin and Sumatra was installed instead.
What’s it doing now? I’ve had it installed for a few years, and other than trying to install a trial of its premium software when it updates, I haven’t noticed anything. I’m wondering if it’s because I’ve turned something off and forgotten about it.
They ditched create-from-scanner function in some of updates of free version, or hid it somewhere. I treasured my old exe where it’s still accessible.
Ah, ok, that’s not something I’d ever used, so I didn’t know it had been removed.
I don’t remember exactly, but it’s definitely quite a large installer with a lot of “extras” and IIRC they’re pushing some cloud service too. I guess it’s standard these days tho.
Time to install
Linux!! 🎉
What is a good alternative for saving fillable form PDFs as a flat file or image? I’ve been using
openofficelibreoffice draw for editing PDFs recently but every method I have come across seems like a workaround rather than a feature, while adobe can do it with a click.just print the form to PDF?
In windows it wont maintain the form size. It will just put it on one of a few preset sizes of paper.
@TheWaterGod
The only time I ever use acrobat is when I need to fill in the blanks of a PDF. Mainly because Preview.app on macOS does a terrible job of thatPlease don’t give Adobe money.
They’re not Oracle. But they’re trying.
Adobe is run by the Ferenghi. They studied the rules of acquisition.
Preferably don’t even use Reader, but something else like Sumatra. Suddenly you won’t even need to upgrade the hardware.
Most people can manage with the embedded PDF reader from their OS or the web browser nowadays.
Yes but everything is stuffed with telemetry, and web browsers are bloated behemoths. So on Windows at least something lightweight like Sumatra rules.
The basic pdf editing options you can find in most browsers (including edge) is more than enough for most people
If you have a mac… well, preview is bloody amazing
Why is Preview not the PDF app on iOS and iPad? It’s Apple’s best software.
Wait… I can edit in Preview?
Preview basically opening most of what you throw at it, with editing options for many is soooo good
Preview > Acrobat Reader. It’s not even a contest.
Imo its not that hard to beat acrobat reader, i hate it!
May I recommend SumatraPDF? It’s so fast at loading and rendering the document
Big fan of Sumatra.
It’s nice for comic books too.
It’s not a PDF editor though. I love Sumatra to death and will attest it loaded my 1000+ page college textbook in an instant. Also auto divided the chapters and subsections into their own table of contents and I could Ctrl+F the entire textbook in seconds.
Unfortunately it still can’t sign and edit PDFs.
+1 for free and open source software, this program just works
God, this is so true. Too many idiots that wanted a full suite license just to print documents.
I see people confuse ‘annotate’ and ‘edit’ a lot. They don’t even try.
We do have Reader at work. When I didn’t have to fill in something for a week or two, I always click the wrong thing (edit) first, have to close down the useless popup and then go to the right thing (annotate).
The UI is built to make you think that having the paid version is the only way to write something inside all those forms.
The best pdf reader for me is Okular. It is free, open source and certified with the German “Blauer Engel” for it’s energy efficiency (as first software ever btw)
Evince for me. I can print off pages from songbooks I have in e-book form. Evince don’t care about no drm
Okular is awesome
I’m loving Librera these days. Full version is free on F-Droid.
Blauer Engel
I don’t think it’s more “power efficient” than other pdf readers (Like Sumatra). It looks like the only reason it got that award is because it’s German software. I’m saying that as Austrian. Super weird thing to give an award to.
How would they even measure it? Pdf readers use close to zero CPU. And using more or less RAM has nothing to do with power usage.
Presumably it means it has been actually audited by a third party for wasteful cycles, etc. It doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s cheaper to run than another app, just that it’s cheaper than some objective standard.
I would bet a million that Adobe is very resource heavy in comparison to Okular. So while it is using almost nothing, everything adds up
Not advocating for the use of that software, but…very easy to measure.
Yes and no, the people making Okular likely applied because they are German, they got the award because they applied for it, and met the Award criteria. The award criteria seems to me fairly general in its approach to software testing, but resonably rigorous as well, the amount and type of measurements required also seem resonably useful for answering roughly the question: “Is the tested software energy and resource efficient”, it can be found here
Pdf readers use close to zero CPU
You say this but devs are making webpages that max out cpu usage when nothing is actually happening to render the webpage, it’s just rerendering stuff unnecessarily because hardware is cheap and no one is calling them on it.
Why would any software be different? It’s super easy to write shitty software, and there ought to be incentives to write it even better than “normal”, which is exactly what this award sounds like.
Show me a single website that “rerenders stuff” all the time to cause CPU spikes. That’s simply not how websites work at all. Websites can’t even max out your CPU usage with normal methods as JavaScript is single-threaded. The only way to max out the CPU in your browser is web workers, but they have nothing to do with website rendering.
Even Adobe Acrobat Reader, which counts as very resource intensive usually, goes to 0% CPU usage after you opened up a pdf and you just let it sit there.
Now you’re just being dumb and argumentative.
You don’t know what you’re talking about
Doubling down eh? No, I will not reveal the company I work for here. Examples would include websites that use webgl and are poorly written. Or even just websites with less than optimal js. Everyone has had the experience of shitty JavaScript freezing their browser and you’re not an exception. Why pretend you’ve not seen that? Why would you be so adamantly wrong about something you clearly know zero about?
I have been a web developer for many years. Also, I’ve used computers more than 2 weeks.
You truly show your ignorance by claiming that software simply doesn’t use unnecessary resources. That is absolutely laughable.
If you’ve ever written a single line of code for money, I feel sorry for your clients.
Also I find it especially moronic that you think anything short of maxing cpu isn’t worthy of a glance. Developers used to build fully functional applications with 1 millionth the resources yet opened in seconds. According to you, it’s impossible to avoid things like Photoshop taking 10 seconds to load on very new hardware
Nobody asked about what company you work for, no clue where you got that from.
I can’t think of a single website I use on the daily that uses webgl, if it’s not a web game or something, most websites are relatively light weight and static once loaded. Hell, even Reddit (which is notorious for being slow) doesn’t use any resources after it’s done loading. There is no website that constantly re-renders stuff out there, except it’s a shitty niche project. Makes no sense at all, you load HTML, CSS and JavaScript, but you don’t re-render the DOM all the time except when things change.
CPU is the most important stat if we actually talk about energy savings. Using more RAM costs pretty much zero energy. GPU rarely used on the web (except we go back to 3D rendering or watching videos). If you use up actual wattage it’s mostly CPU related.
Yes, current applications are slow and bloated, but the original conversation was about pdf viewers. And even the most shitty pdf viewer I can think of uses no extra power after opening the pdf (pretty much zero CPU usage, just some RAM, which again is “free” in terms of power consumption). So if you compare pdf viewers I’d bet pretty much any of them could earn that reward if they applied for it.
I could have easily given an example of a web page that uses a ton of CPU while idle. But a contractor built it on may company’s website years ago and it’s not a priority to fix it. While I don’t know or care if it truly “maxed” the CPU, that wasn’t the point at all. The point was that it was a WEB PAGE, which a lot of people noticed that while sitting practically idle (a very simple animation playing) caused laptop fans to spin up like crazy.
But my slight exaggeration (using the word “max”) aside, the point was that any software can run inefficiently and that even small differences could add up to significant energy waste when deployed to millions of users.
I’m not sure why you’d make a claim that a PDF viewer could never be inefficient enough to matter. Of fucking course it could. Unless you have completed a study proving otherwise, you’re just talking out of your ass, and it’s a really weird hill to die on.
Mate, we are talking about international / widely used websites here. Of course you can build a shit website that eats up resources, I can do that in a single line of code. But the average website out there doesn’t burn up resources for no reason at all, most content is static and just sits there after being loaded.
Open up any PDF viewer you like, whatever you think is the heaviest or shittiest one (Probably Adobe). Load a big pdf file, now check the resource usage. It’s going to be absolutely nothing, any Electron app (like Discord) eats up way more RAM and CPU time.
Now get out with your straw man argument, you derailed this whole conversation by going from pdf readers to websites with this comment:
You say this but devs are making webpages that max out cpu usage when nothing is actually happening to render the webpage, it’s just rerendering stuff unnecessarily because hardware is cheap and no one is calling them on it.
You can view and edit in Firefox, use that and I bet the number of people who don’t need acrobat would jump to 99%
Look, say what you will, but I kinda like using Edge as a pdf reader. Its out-of-the-box PDF markup features really speak to me, I don’t know why.
LibreOffice Draw does nice editing as well, I’ve just learned that recently
And PDF Arranger is very simple for rearranging, rotating, inserting, removing and rotating pages
