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Correct, you get what you pay for. Acrobat Pro supports advanced rotations for only $14.99 per month.

https://www.adobe.com/acrobat/pricing.html

> Acrobat Pro supports advanced rotations for only $14.99 per month.

That right there is a peak-2022 quote, alright!

Why doesn’t Microsoft take the hint and make a decent pdf viewer / editor thingy?

They seemed to get the hint on the terminal finally…

Handle basic viewing, editing, signatures. Etc…

While we are at it a GTK one would be great in Gnome too…

As Balmer put it: developers, developers, developers.

In other words: the purpose of (consumer) Windows isn't to make money for Microsoft; the purpose of (consumer) Windows is to create a sales channel — "Windows users" — for Windows developers like Adobe to sell their Windows software products into.

Microsoft then makes their money off those very same Windows developers, through corporate Windows licensing, Office subscriptions, Azure, etc.

As such, Microsoft tries as much as possible to avoid "bringing in" any features that are currently being sold as products by companies in their developer ecosystem (which would deprive those developers of revenue, and thus deprive them of revenue.) Acrobat charges to rotate images? Better not offer native image rotation.

The opposite of “sherlocking”

This is the impression I have from Wordpress as well. Some of the most basic features you would expect a blogging platform or a brochure site creator to have out of the box are conspicuously missing, and I strongly suspect the reason for their absence is NOT for the sake of keeping the base WP install small, but rather because there are paid plugins in the Wordpress Plugin Directory which fulfill those basic functions, thereby providing a marketplace to incentivize WP development, regardless of how basic the functionality that you're looking for is. There is indeed a vibrant WP marketplace as a consequence of this, but should I really have to install a 3rd party library to get simple modal windows? Regardless of how much popups suck, they're something that every commercial client asks for at some point, and instead of having a single way of doing it which is official, well-maintained, and trustworthy, you have to shop around and try out every mystery devshop's kneecapped freemium version, many of which pelt you with banner ads and/or conflict with another shitty-ass plugin! It's very much a developer-centric way of doing things. Fine, that's a worthy cause, especially since Wordpress is free; but more often than not, the best solution is to invest in one of the plugin "suites" which do more than one thing without interfering with other things. As much as I like composition and "do one thing and do it well," if you try to go down that path with Wordpress plugins, you're asking for it.

my guess is that Terminal, powerToys, and WSL were approved by MS management because they wold contribute to more sales to advanced users who would otherwise choose Linux. the same cannot be said about PDF viewers.

I also find it strange that MS keeps pushing people to use Edge as a PDF reader. only goes to show how valuable user data is, or rather, how desperate MS is for such data.

> As such, Microsoft tries as much as possible to avoid "bringing in" any features that are currently being sold as products by companies in their developer ecosystem (which would deprive those developers of revenue, and thus deprive them of revenue.) Acrobat charges to rotate images? Better not offer native image rotation.

to be fair, Apple does the same. lots of functionalities that you would expect from macOS are left for third party apps to provide. for example, changing external monitor volume, a proper window management that snaps windows to edges/corners, remembering the position of apps in different desktops, enabling font smoothing, enabling HiDPI on external displays, limiting apps’ CPU usage, etc.

Each of them costs like $15 which adds up to hundreds. But even if money wasn’t a problem, it’d still be concerning to use hacky methods that are sometimes closed source too.

You can use the Adobe Reader Classic Track, which is still on the feature level of 2020 and allows counterclockwise rotation: https://www.adobe.com/devnet-docs/acrobatetk/tools/ReleaseNo...

Unfortunately doesn't seem to be the case. All I have is "rotate clockwise" and it's just like Reader DC in that it rotates the view of the entire document rather than actually rotating a page.

It's missing the rotation arrow buttons that bug you to buy a subscription, so that's a bit nicer than the current Reader DC release. I assume this is just because it lags behind the main release and they'll be rolled in as a future update on the Classic track?

View > Show/Hide > Toolbar Items > Show Page Display Tools > Counterclockwise

Yes, that rotates your view of every page in the document. It can't rotate a page independently and even if you wanted to rotate every page you can't save the change back to the PDF file because it's functionally "rotate view" even though they hadn't renamed it that yet in 2020.

Appreciate the attempt to help, but Acrobat Reader is just shitty.

I know it's a deliberate choice to be useless in pursuit of selling more subscriptions, but it's hard to cut them a lot of slack for having a worse free PDF tool than what Apple was shipping for free on all their computers more than 20 years ago.

Well, Adobe Reader is a viewer, not an editor (that’s Adobe Acrobat). For light editing like rotating pages I’d recommend the free version of PDF-XChange Editor: https://www.tracker-software.com/product/pdf-xchange-editor (Persistent rotation is on the “Organize” tab.)

It’s easy for Apple because they don’t sell a competing product. Adobe has to balance providing a useful free viewer against a paid editor (or payed extra functions). There’s certainly a lot I’d like to see improved/included in Adobe Reader, but I also recognize that they are in a different market position than Apple.

If someone hands me a stack of papers to read and half of the pages are upside down, I consider orienting the pages so they all have the text right-side-up to be part of reading it. I understand Adobe doesn't have hardware sales to prop up their software but I think it's pretty unreasonable to charge $15/month to rotate pages within a document.

They do let you fill in forms and comment in the free version, even though that's not strictly speaking under the definition of "reading".

I'm currently rotating pages by sending them to my iPad and using Documents by Readdle. Not sure if that's part of the free features or because I bought their PDF Expert and some of the PDF editing capability gets shared across apps.

Yeah, I'm not going to argue about that particular feature -- I mean Adobe Reader does allow you to rotate the page display for viewing purposes, just not in the way you'd prefer -- but the broader perspective is that Adobe roughly differentiates between authoring a document and using a document -- authoring is what costs money. Form fill-in is not authoring, and under the hood it's actually more similar to commenting/highlighting (adding stuff "on top" of the normal page content), which are also reader/viewer functions.

So my real problem here is the disconnect between Adobe's "rotate view clockwise" being a document-wide operation, and the fact that actual PDF documents don't have consistent page orientation throughout.

It's usually that all of the pages are consistently oriented as portrait, but some of them actually have landscape content.

The incorrect portrait page orientation was probably done on purpose to keep printers from screwing it up, and rotating a piece of paper to look at it barely requires a thought. No big deal if you're printing it.

But the ease of looking at a single page sideways and then going back to the original rotation doesn't map to reading it on a computer screen with document-wide rotate commands, and they really should've sucked it up and let me fix individual pages. Even if it's a temporary "view" change and not something I can save back to the file.

What I hate about software like PDF viewers is that they are akin to:

Here I printed your manuscript, but in order to read it, you need to pay me for these special glasses to see the ink.

Oh you want a change? Pay me for these special gloves so you may handle the pages and reorganize them as you like.

Agreed, on a Mac I feel like a PDF document is a stack of paper that I can rearrange, copy, rotate, and otherwise handle however I want to.

On Windows it's more like a hardcover bound book that I can download and attach to an email to share with someone, but god forbid I want to change anything.

They can make me use Windows in the office, but next time something dies in my home PC I'm just going to sell the rest of it for parts and replace it with a Steam Deck.

I sometimes wonder if Preview being so much easier than Acrobat isn't an intentional poke at Adobe for all the times Adobe strayed from the one true path of Apple. That whole skipping a version of software release because Adobe didn't pay attention to words from up on high to quite using deprecated language surely didn't sit well.

It originated on NeXTStep which used Display Postscript.

The graphics primitives still apply to macOS.

Comparing to Preview, just opening Acrobat is pain.

I recommend trying SumatraPDF - it also supports epub.

I think preview on MacOS is great but when I'm on windows (and 95% of the time I'm on Mac) I open PDFs in Chrome (Firefox would probably work as well). Both have a built in sandboxed reader.

In fact pretty much the only time I open a PDF in preview is to merge 1 or more PDFs (show the thumbnails, copy and paste them from one to the other).

Otherwise I never use Preview for PDFs and I reference tons of PDF based specs.

On the other hand I use Preview to quickly crop or markup screenshots all the time.