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Comment by scrumper | Hacker News Reader

I was pretty shocked by this. I recently bought an old PC laptop to use in my workshop, to run some engine diagnostic software and machine control stuff that doesn't work on Mac. Of course one of the first things it needed was some PDF reading tool so I went for Reader, figuring Adobe's tool would be the least scummy. Installed it and suddenly I was getting McAfee popups? God knows what else it installed along with it. It's horrible. And the shop manual I'm trying to navigate while covered in oil keeps getting obscured by AI popups and ads. F'ing hell.

Maybe I will try this Sumatra thing that the article mentions. I'm coming from Mac where I have Preview built in, and I really don't have the bandwidth to research a goddamned PDF reader. Very disappointed in Adobe.

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All browsers open PDF files really well and sometimes better than Acrobat. Just need Chrome, Firefox, Edge, etc.

I'm generally looking at multi kilopage manuals where rapid search and navigation are important, and good zooming for diagrams. I didn't even try a browser as the machine is a bit constrained and I just thought it'd be too slow. But I'll try...

I run into this problem so often that I've been experimenting with rendering all the PDF pages to png images first, and a program that loads all of them on screen at once.

The upside is that it is extremely fast, there is no loading time because all the images are loaded already.

The downside is that it uses an obscene amount of memory. A 500 page manual could run you 8-10Gb of RAM. Also there is no more text highlighting or control-F.

But the fact that even this "works" as well as it does indicates how much worse PDF readers are at this, especially when you get those scanned documents that still have the full images anyways, with lousy or no OCR. They take forever (multiple seconds per page) to load when your in a PDF in chrome and jump somewhere else in the document. Why not go back to image files for those ones to begin with?

I've found Sumatra to be okay at best for PDF compatibility. There are definitely times, heck even in the last week, where PDFs have failed to load or loaded as blank pages. But even then it's still my default.

Literally the same. Went to deploy a Windows 7 laptop for some Motorola software and documentation and went to download the latest Reader executable.

I was shocked when the offered executable for Windows 7 was the 600MB+ release and ended up dumping it for SumatraPDF myself.

8 MB is so much nicer than 600, especially on a laptop with only 1GB of RAM.

I have the paid version of Adobe Acrobat. The sheer number of pop-ups in that app is insanely infuriating. It's hard to get any work done. Especially now as they run ads inside it for their "AI" features (which are a paid add-on).

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