Comment by oh-4-fucks-sake | Hacker News Reader

Comment by oh-4-fucks-sake | Hacker News Reader

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oh-4-fucks-sake

For just a free, straight-forward, full-featured PDF reader/viewer/text-finder I've been a long time user of Foxit Reader: https://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf-reader/

It's a mature product at this point and have had a good experience for years now.

I haven't used it on Mac, but PDF Expert[1] from Readdle has been great on my iPad - I use it to both read and edit PDFs. It's fast and the UI is intuitive.

1: https://pdfexpert.com/

Just tried it. PDF Expert would not display the government fillable forms that Preview also will not display.

The app offered to convert the PDFs if I would email them to PDF Expert, and suggested Adobe products as an alternative. Nice try, but Foxit displayed the PDFs and allowed me to fill in the fields.

On the Mac (which this article is about), what do you use Foxit for that built in Preview.app can’t do?

I still routinely encounter fillable forms that Preview.app can't handle, particularly with checkboxes or large text areas. It also frequently uses the wrong font in PDF forms meaning text doesn't fit in the prescribed form fields.

You can also overlay your own text in Preview, ignoring the PDF's own textbox.

Does Foxit work for those and other edge cases? I've used Preview.app for years and only the past few months have encountered incompatible PDFs. I reluctantly downloaded Acrobat Reader. The PDF required a signature and locked the document for editing...that was annoying and not completely obvious.

Just tried it. Foxit works with the fillable government forms that I have not been able to read for months because Preview won't display them.

I agonized about installing Acrobat Reader, but Suspicious Package says it wants to run 88 install scripts. I don't feel like tracking down that much malware when I uninstall it after filling out a form.

Go Foxit!

My use case is making lots of highlights in textbook PDFs and I usually can't highlight for long before it beachballs. PDF Expert is a huge upgrade in this respect.

Readdle just needs to add exact phrase searching/finding; then it'll be wholly better than Preview imo.

You can read more about Preview's struggles with annotations here https://eclecticlight.co/2020/04/07/how-preview-mangles-anno...

I used to recommend Foxit too, but all major browsers now ship with good PDF support.

Not Safari.

How so? I have no problem opening PDF links directly in Safari.

Safari "supports PDF", but not well. The PDF viewer is run in an extremely janky view that clearly has not been updated in years. It runs out-of-process, but takes little advantage of the many advances in XPC rendering that have come in recent years; as such it cannot handle looking up services correctly, or vibrancy, or even have Retina support for its UI. And those are just visual: the PDF support itself is shoddy; it's unable to do many things that other browsers can do out-of-the-box (forms?), searching for text has been broken for the better part of a year. It's an obvious rough spot in Safari's otherwise polished interface.

Fair criticism. I guess my bar for what I define as "good PDF support" is much lower than yours - I only generally read them or plug in a digital signature when signing my lease.

Personally, I am loath to download documents. I actually like what iOS Safari does, which is run the generic document previewer on files inside the app itself. I hate clicking on a link on my computer and then getting a PPTX that I have to open in PowerPoint.

For me, not being in the browser is a feature, not a bug. I often want to be able to open a PDF in a dedicated window I can easily switch to.

Sure, but you can open a PDF in a new browser window. I'd rather not broaden my trusted codebase by installing another PDF reader.

OSs have this annoying habit of condensing multiple windows of a single application down to one taskbar item/dock item/whatever.

What is the difference between having multiple pdf reader windows vs multiple browser windows then? If you are on a mac: cmd+` is your friend.

I only have one PDF window open.

On Windows this can easily be remedied in the options accessible via the taskbar. I always turn this off and tell it to show the full window titles instead of just the icons. Windows are not browser tabs, I don't ever have enough of them open to need that stacking behaviour.

Another option for Chrome/Windows is to open a Guest window or an Incognito window, which is treated as a separate window-group.

Too late to edit: I see now that only a Guest window gets its own window-group. Incognito windows do not.

The problem with PDF is that it's a bag of needles disguised as a piece of paper. Most of the time people expect a PDF to be a document, not a Form, Rich Media, Contract, Javascript, or any of the other crap it can do. All that extra crap dramatically increases the attack surface area of Acrobat or any other PDF reader that supports it.

At least the PDF reader in Firefox is a Javascript App that runs in a Browser sandbox and doesn't support 99% of the crap a PDF can do.

But do they remember your position in the PDF between restarts? I some times read books or lecture notes in PDF format, and dedicated programs works much better for that than the support in browsers

For Windows, there's great SumatraPDF: https://www.sumatrapdfreader.org

On Linux, Okular[0] offers some of paid Reader's functionality for free. c:

0: https://okular.kde.org/

You basically can't do much with the free version. Here's the list of things you ave to pay for: https://www.foxitsoftware.com/downloads/pdf-reader-thanks.ph...

Foxit reader is quite decent and much faster than Acrobat

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