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Comment by Etheryte | Hacker News Reader

I use many of these features often and it often blows my mind just how much better Preview is with PDFs than any other program. It's leaps ahead of anything Adobe's Acrobat spyware ever was and it comes with your OS right out of the box.

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Apparently "Apple’s Core Graphics framework uses the PDF format for its internal vector graphics presentation."

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

Yeah, there was a switch to PDF from Display PostScript at the time of the NeXT merger.

The memory is mostly lost to time but MacOS X before 10.4 (released in 2005) took PDF screenshots of the desktop.

I think that pissed a lot of people off, ha ha. But if you had multiple displays .... multi-page PDF. PNG still can't do that. :-)

Speaking as an iOS developer, we use PDF files to represent our vector icon assets in the app.

I thought it was a bit odd of a choice on the platform vs SVG which seems more popular (and which the Android devs on our team use), but CoreGraphics using it internally ties the whole picture together.

SumatraPDF is what you want as a windows user (yes, ignore the website looks like it's from the 90s). No upsells like acrobat/foxit, better compatibility than pdf.js like your browser.

Linux I mostly use evince (included if you use a Gnome based distro), but it's clearly the weakest of Preview/SumatraPDF/evince, as someone who uses all 3 regularly. Still better than Acrobat Reader though.

Hey, I just updated the website https://www.sumatrapdfreader.org (for reference, the old one: https://sumatra-website-preview.onrender.com/free-pdf-reader).

Does it look better? Maybe early 2000?

Looks great!

Thanks.

Also, in pre-release version I've added a feature that I'm super stoked about: a command palette https://www.sumatrapdfreader.org/docs/Command-Palette

And fully customizable keyboard shortucts https://www.sumatrapdfreader.org/docs/Customizing-keyboard-s...

Don't be ashamed of 90's looking websites, I've been conditioned to associate that with extreme competence.

For example https://www.rockauto.com

I was never one to be bothered by it personally, just responding to reactions others have had when I pointed to it previously (in particular I've often defended HN and Old Reddit design vs newer trends).

That said, I think the updates will reduce the number of people that react that way.

I remember in the early 2000s, right around the time that Acrobat Reader had started rapidly bloating and becoming worse, upgrading to the first release of OS X and feeling relieved after finding out that installing Reader wouldn’t be necessary. Even in the buggy slow mess that was OS X 10.0.4, Preview was still a great deal better than Reader at most of the things you’d use a PDF app for.

I don't understand. Preview is by far the slowest PDF viewer I've ever used. Scrolling through 100+page documents brings it to its knees.

Gthumb in my experience is far more performant. Scrolls like butter, regardless of PDF size. But unfortunately I don't think there's a macOS native UI port.

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