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Comment by pletnes | Hacker News Reader

I would really appreciate if someone could put a decent PDF reader, like Sumatra, into a PDF so I could have a portable and good PDF reader on locked down computers.

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Are you going to open that PDF in Adobe Reader?

If yes, Adobe has this friendly AI assistant forced into your face and overlapping floating toolbar on all sides of your document that you cannot get rid of to get a clean view of the document itself.

So your dream of a simple lightweight clutterfree PDF reader will remain a dream, unfortunately.

I mean if he’s searching for a good PDF reader I doubt he’ll be opening it in Adobe Reader

I had assumed it went the way of Adobe Flash many years ago.

Well, you know what they say about assume...

Accidentally Turing complete?

It's still alive and kicking in anything government. Third party support for forms and other kinds of interactive stuff is ... lacking.

True but also, what actually is the best alternative that's also free? Non-rhetorical question, because I am averse to paying for what feels like a universal/commons piece of tech.

Someone must put in the effort to make something. Should they not be compensated for their time?

If they inform and ask after the fact, compensation should be voluntary.

When I was a Mac user, I found the built in Preview adequate to my needs.

I'm not an advanced user of pdfs so I'm not sure if there's anything major missing from these, but either Okular or just the built-in browser ones works well enough for my basic needs of reading and the occasional form filling for the desktop, and on android I use muPdf.

Most browsers can open PDFs but can’t necessarily search large docs quickly.

AI assistants are this generation's Clippy.

There is the classic Adobe Reader release [0] (non-DC) that is still receiving updates [1].

[0] https://www.adobe.com/devnet-docs/acrobatetk/tools/ReleaseNo...

[1] https://www.adobe.com/devnet-docs/acrobatetk/tools/ReleaseNo...

It's even served by FTP. Nice!

it's wild how shitty and hostile adobe's pdf reader is as a product. If I was in the planning room I'd roast the product as unusually offensive to most sensibilities.

Then again, I'm in no way running a billion dollar successful software company so what do I know?

PDF, the true universal app platform. Please don't tell Microsoft.

PDF clusters: each page of the document is running an independent virtual machine, and they share a private network.

throw in a bunch of kubernetes just to make it more interesting.

this sounds like the beginning of a cyberattack....

You can run MuPDF in Wasm: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40096113

Believe it or not, that's my use-case for MS Edge, it has surprisingly decent features (for editing too)

I actually hit this recently with a Google Docs generated PDF (print -> download) that wasn't rendering correctly in Chrome or Firefox, but did load as expected in Edge.

Sumatra has also a portable version. Doesn't that work for you?

If IT finds an exe file they go bonkers. If they find a PDF, who will even care?

Pray Microsoft Defender will be nice enough to not look at the PDF too closely.

It can use the pdf reader in the pdf to look closely if it wants to

Depends on how long they've been in IT. A good while back, exploits in adobe reader were so common that pdf files were a common malware vector.

Still you will need reader to open that pdf

The PDF reader is embedded in Linux within a PDF that is within a PDF.

"Yo dawg I heard you like pdfs so I put a pdf reader into your pdfs so that you can pdf while you pdf".

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