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Comment by jerzyt | Hacker News Reader

My gripe with PDF is that I don't understand why a standard format which is almost 30 years old, requires seemingly weekly updates of the Acrobat Reader, which in turn requires reboot of my work laptop. I upgrade the reader far more often than I actually use it.

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Now days you don't need acrobat reader typically, Chrome, Edge and Firefox can all view/print PDF's. If your on a Mac/iOS the viewers are built as the OS uses display postscript internally (quartz) which matches up pretty closely with PDF.

Chrome/Firefox don't handle complex PDF's well. They render slowly and sometimes inaccurately

It's not uncommon to print things from Chrome/Firefox and have the margins/cropping be wrong. Then again you're using a web browser to print a pdf file, you get what you deserve

I very rarely run into this in Chrome, they licensed Foxit and made it open source https://opensource.google.com/projects/pdfium its native and fast.

Firefox I think still uses https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js which was not bad last time I used it, but it all javascript so performance isn't up to par with native. Also printing is not great and I don't think they have implemented a SVG backend yet for better printing. On the plus side you can embed it in your web app if you want and have more control over the viewer.

Chrome is not too bad these days. They 'forked' the foxit codebase and unless you need some weird features, chrome should render the page accurately. The margins are specified in the page data in the document.

Sounds like your gripe is with Adobe, not PDF.

Technically, you are correct, but in a corporate environment of managed software, I can't separate the format from the company. When an update is scheduled I have no choice but install and reboot.

Couldn't you open it in a browser? Or does it want to install regardless of if you open Adobe?

Probably because Adobe's PDF reader is full of vulnerabilities and constantly used to spread viruses and compromise machines. I wouldn't be surprised if there were more malware infested PDF files on the internet than legit ones.

That is acrobat's fault not pdf.

there is churn in all major applications these days regardless of if it is needed. Reader is just trying to regain mind-share back from people viewing pdfs in browsers.

https://pdfreaders.org

sumatrapdf works fine

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