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Comment by azinman2 | Hacker News Reader

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...

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