Hacker News Reader

Comment by rythie | Hacker News Reader

A lot of people prefer to receiving PDFs because they are safer than MS Office documents. Maybe not eh?

PDF's are not inherently insecure. It's just that Adobe Reader is crap (and any sane person would have switched to a better option a long time ago).

Can you list one of those options?

Foxit Reader if you are on Windows, Preview if you're on a Mac, evince if you're on Linux.

I personally do not use Adobe Reader on any platform. I found the alternatives to be both leaner and not lacking any relevant features.

Lately Foxit has been feeling even slower and more bloated than the current Adobe Reader, at least on my setup. I'm pretty happy with SumatraPDF, although it is not terribly featureful so I have Adobe Reader installed as well.

I went back to Adobe after finding Foxit failed to lay out some PDFs correctly (legibly).

sumatra PDF is also a better option

I also use SumatraPDF and find it excellent.

I tried it yesterday, and I was horribly disappointed. Printing a 13 page document took so long (>30s) that I kept killed the process, thinking it had hung. Acrobat 5.something ripped and spooled the same document in maybe a second.

I don't use Reader, as far as I can... unfortunately, some PDF features are not well supported by other clients - for example, comments/mark-up doesn't seem to show up in Preview, usually.

Is there a properly full-featured PDF viewer for Mac that isn't from Adobe?

There are a bunch of alternative PDF readers, I don't know if they are all full featured but I have never run into something that didn't work for me in Sumatra PDF or Foxit Reader. Lifehacker did a roundup a while ago of PDF reader alternatives: http://lifehacker.com/5328211/five-best-pdf-readers

Well is that really true? They've bundled loads of features into the format, the other readers might be safer but only because they don't support those features and they will try to add them at some point. Also PDF is based on postscript which is programming language. It's sufficiently complex that's is never going to be very secure, and after all the main problem with Office documents was Macros.

I don't know a lot of people who would put money on Office being safer than PDF, but I concede that it's surprising that the PDF format could even be a contender in this race.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com