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Comment by juliangmp | Hacker News Reader

Personally I'm still impressed by Adobe's work there. They designed the PDF format but still manage to have the worst PDF reader on the entire market.

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It aint easy being cheesy. It’s truly impressive how they’ve been able to lock in and lock down the entire corporate world for 2 decades while being that mediocre.

Also equally baffling how mediocre all the alternatives are.

PDF Expert is excellent. It's insane to me that they don't bring it to PC. It would be a gold mine.

PDF Expert can tap into the Quartz 2D API on Apple platforms, which is likely why they’re excellent. PDFs have been first class citizens on Mac OS X and its derivatives for 25 years.

Some companies are more focused on the PvP aspects of business.

Your browser is an alternative, if you want it to be! I read PDFs in the browser quite a bit.

This works for about 95% of the documents.

For the rest you need a purpose built reader. Often Sumatra or other open source readers will work with the more complex functions in PDFs (signing, bill processing, etc).

I have Acrobat installed on my corp laptop, but I use Sumatra rather than Acrobat, because I like my reader to simply be a reader instead of a 13GB bloated piece of garbage. I'm also a big fan of my reader not crashing at the slightest breeze.

> the entire corporate world for 2 decades while being that mediocre

Because most of the corporate world is mediocre. Employees put up with a lot of BS every day, Acrobat and PDFs are just the icing on the cake. And they're risk adverse. "This is what I know".

It's like when the complaints Windows and Office come around (for decades). People got used to it enough, and don't have to pay for it, so why change.

All periods can be replaced by ? if you want...I'm merely speculating having been in all sizes of companies by now. :)

Until LLM models came along, I was convinced the first file format to gain sentience would be a PDF.

It can contain vector drawings, fonts, bitmap images, formatting, hypertext, plain text, rasterization hints (for everything from watch displays to 10 ton multicolor printing presses), layers, annotations, metadata, versioning, multiple languages, interactive forms, digital signatures/encryption, DRM, audio, video, 3D objects including CAD drawings, accessibility info, captions, file attachments and yes, even JavaScript. (And probably more - most of that was off the top of my head plus a quick search to remind myself.)

I'm personally amazed that any application can successfully open and edit a PDF document without creating a black hole in space, so Acrobat's continued suckiness into its third decade doesn't surprise me in the least.

The fact that they called it "portable" document format and now I regularly get PDFs that display "Please open this file in Acrobat" if opened in any other viewer... Great stuff.

Wait, this actually happens?

Constantly. They added a bunch of scripting extensions so a lot of fillable forms render a message telling you to use Acrobat until all of that stuff executes.

Those are probably PDFs with XFA forms. Not very common in general but if you often get PDFs from sources that use that then yeah you'll see it all the time. Good news it that it was deprecated, it's not in PDF 2.0.

Happens often if you're using documents that are signed with a smart card. Sadly, browsers can't sign PDFs yet either.

This might actually be causal to an extent. A sibling comment mentions the early-mover advantage they got for their software from originating the format (initially in a locked-down form—IIRC, they actually prohibited Microsoft from including a PDF export feature in Office in the 90s). But another contribution to this is that there’ve put an absolutely unbelievable amount of stuff into the format while they were still milking it (how many flavours of PDF forms are there? three I think, one of which is XForms submitted over something equally execrable? also JavaScript support of course, can’t forget about the JavaScript support); and Acrobat is the only piece of software that supports—has to support—them all.

They created the format, which means they don't need to make a good reader. Simple inertia guarantees them a good amount of revenue selling to corporations, and those contracts are usually quite juicy, especially the ones where the person signing the contract isn't forced to use said product. (cough Microsoft Teams)

Improving the product would be a significant amount of work, cost a lot of money, and why do that when you can just sit back and rack in the cash?

A month ago, I opened an old PDF file on MacOS Monterey and found that Preview couldn't display the images in it. Chrome browser on Monterey shows inlined images. I've read this PDF on Windows for years. For Monterey I had to convert it with some online converter in order to watch inlined images.

My favorite "the worst PDF reader" is MacOS Preview.

> They designed the PDF format but still manage to have the worst PDF reader on the entire market.

Hm. I hate Acrobat but it is still the best pdf program on Windows.

pdf.js is a parody if you have more than 3 pages.

This is a lot like Microsoft having Outlook for multiple decades and it's somehow still the very worst email client.

Half my org still uses Outlook classic and even it's laughably unstable.

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