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Comment by InitialLastName | Hacker News Reader

Why is it that, a ~decade since MacOS started including forms and markups in their default PDF app (Preview) there still isn't a sane PDF editor for Windows? Chrome and Firefox's PDF viewers don't have editing, Edge has editing and forms but bonkers window management (sometimes PDFs open with Edge but not in an Edge window). Adobe Reader DC still tries to ship with malware, and is license-restricted. What gives?

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I use PDF XChange Editor, and convinced my company it was worth it to pay for it (which it is). Aside from editing capabilities and everything else you'd want, it opens and searches large files far quicker than anything else I tried.

On mobile, I use MuPDF but its limited on features and I use because it's quick.

I've always been sketched out by PDF XChange Editor (not sure if it's the name, the developer's name, or the model) but it's interesting to hear that it's legit. Will have a look!

Yeah, the website also looks very offbrand, but the product is really more than just solid.

Granted, MuPDF is intended to not have a ton of features. Just the essentials.

My recollection is that you need a license to PDF patents from Adobe to implement those things, and Apple is somehow grandfathered themselves into those licenses via NeXT.

(But upon writing that I'm not sure where I got that impression from, and I can't find a citation for it right now, so treat the claim with skepticism.)

ignoring the "thoughts on flash"[0] letter, the apple <=> adobe relationship goes back to at least the apple LaserWriter[1], so that would definitely make sense

the Quartz compositor itself has "use[d] pdf internally"[2][3] ever since the initial launch of Mac OS X

> By the time OS X came out, these were less the kind of features that "the next great personal computer operating system" should have, and more the kind that they all had. What was new included how Quartz, the engine for OS X's "killer graphics," was based on PDF.

> "What does that mean?" asked Jobs. "You know when you go to the web and you see PDF documents? Well, that technology is now at the core of Mac OS X's graphics. So you can image PDFs instantly. So now all applications get this for free."

> It's how, to this day, every Mac app can produce a PDF document without needing a third-party app.[4]

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20100531072734/http://www.apple....

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaserWriter#Apple's_developmen...

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ko4V3G4NqII / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-fkYFV7rOY

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_(graphics_layer)#Use_of...

[4]: https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/03/24/apple-launched-it...

https://pspdfkit.com/blog/2020/apple-and-pdf-history/

Apple did it because they were the underdog 15-20 years ago. Microsoft doesn't give a shit. There's no realistic market opportunity for a small third party to get a sizeable amount of revenue either, with Adobe looming.

I kinda miss the early 90s when we actually had competing software "houses" with some financial muscle.

Wrong answer, at least for a time. Microsoft was actually sued by Adobe over the PDF implementation with Office 2007 (before it was standardised in ISO, that was circa 2008-9 if I remember correctly). That's also the reason that XPS (the weird Microsoft format, not Dell laptops) exists.

Nowadays though, I don't really know since Microsoft has successfully overturned that case (probably because of Adobe being Adobe?).

So, not really the wrong answer for the past 12 years or so, then.

The number of years depends on when the various patents expire. Does anyone know?

preview.app has been around since NextSTEP, which used display postscript for its windowing engine. Having a first-class pdf reader falls out pretty naturally.

Sure. Spending money on implementing okayish PDF forms support.. I'm going to out on a limb here and say that it wasn't done out a position of strength.

wild guess here -- MacOS had given way to MacOSX, but commercial printing and publication workflows had not. Windows via market mechanisms (plus assorted dirty tricks), had a lot of installed desktops by that time in the print world, with a much smaller set of the artsy people and some others still championing Macs. When MacOSX got stable after the first few releases, the NeXTstep postscript handlers were there, and Apple wanted to compete to get users to buy new Macintosh hardware for print. Anything and everything to attract print people was definitely included.

Forms were appealing to some businesses and I dont have insights on that part of it, other than noting that odd media formats and bolt-on web'by things were being added to PDF at the time, and as for common forms solutions, apparently fifteen years later its still not settled.

I just use KDE Okular on windows, it’s available in the microsoft store.

Okular works.

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