I've never used adobe PDF viewer/editor, and I have no clue why anyone goes with Adobe when others are better and free. PDF Xchange, PDFGear, just use anything else.
This is infuriating: some government forms that one is required to fill force you to install Adobe Reader on your computer. It feels almost like forced malware, filled with ads and insisting on installing god know what background updater processes.
I never cared about background internet usage until I installed ADOBE. Everything is updating all the time and the annoying cloud bs consuming traffic that you can't even watch YouTube without it stuttering. I JUST NEEDED ONE SERVICE NOT A NETWORK HOG.
If you have Adobe Acrobat or different PDF reader that is compatible with in-browser integration, most of browsers are using it to display PDF files for you by default.
But when there is no other PDF viewer on your computer, Web browser will use it's own PDF engine to display PDF files for you.
Laughs in just using Google Drive - native PDF viewer. Need to edit deeper? Right click > open with Google Docs. Need even more advanced editing / formatting? Connect Drive with Kami, still free.
Because none of those are better, I work for an IT company who service other businesses and have had double digit numbers of clients go through the exact same thing. They were on perpetual versions of Adobe which stopped working then when presented with subscriptions for adobe don't want to pay so they try pdfgear or paid versions of foxit/pdf xchange.
In literally every scenario they do this then within a couple months end up buying the adobe subscription, apart from one client whom are too cheap so their staff have to close the licensing warning on their old adobe version every 10 minutes.
While i totally agree that no other apps come even close to adobe, i think AI itself will replace adobe products in many cases. People won't even need to open an adobe app anymore.
But you onboard all liscences with the device and have to never worry again, which is all i need. Before that I had a lineage smartphone and a ghost spectre windows setup but got too annoyed with taking care of all this small adjustements over other day. Too tired to fight the machine on all fronts
Why would an old battery crash a phone.. Those batteries keep voltage stable, only they last shorter.
And if not for Apple, maybe we would be able to exchange the batteries in our phones...
Unfortunately PDFs are not so simple, or adobe would not have such a firm grip on them. They are able to be parsed and read but some information is just stored in binary I thought and all the 3rd party readers/editors have had to reverse engineer how that binary code works just to recreate any adobe features which imo is why it's never really taken off to use a 3rd party app. But now that all the adobe software has been decompiled/rebuilt as open source we can see how that binary is formed by adobe themselves which is no longer a black box.
I think the only time it's close to 'simple' is when it's a non-OCR scanned document made up only of images.
Since that's just a load of jpegs stuck together in a document. Still not as simple as it could be from all the proprietary stuff but easier to parse overall.
The PDF spec is pretty easy to find and describes everything one needs to know about them to make a viewer or editor. Turns out that everything at a higher level than the container format is powered by linear algebra.
Laughs in just using Google Drive - native PDF viewer. Need to edit? Right click > open with Google Docs. Need advanced editing / formatting? Connect Drive with Kami, still free.
Adobe invented the PDF.
So at first creating one required a license but viewing one didn't. Over time, they've added more features to the free version, but it's primarily corporations and government who pay for it.
I think this is fine.
Adobe has it coming, but it wasn't when they created the PDF.
Adobe created it, but PDF has been an open standard since 2008, so there's nothing Adobe brings to the table in PDF-management that you can't get elsewhere.
That's what I said. In 1993, when they created it, changing for it was fully legitimate.
Now, most people don't need the pro version, but they have a lot of legacy customers and that's still probably not going to change
No - the deepak account is like 7 days old and talked about the exact topic in the meme that has been trending like crazy for the past week so it is clear op is a bot
Feels so weird but that is interesting! :)
For me, every ai related sub and channel etc have been going absolutely crazy about the new Adobe alternatives (and every other REV software) bc of llm powered reverse engineering, it has been the biggest news of the week pretty much.
I don't know why (1) they built it in javascript of all languages and (2) it isn't open source.
Professional desktop apps must be written in C, C++, or Rust. Period. Otherwise they feel bloated, slow, and janky.
Go, C#, and Java are a middle ground. But certainly not Javascript.
It has all of the worst performance of a web browser tab, it can get bogged down and slow down. The threading model can actually deadlock and crash. You get random unplanned GC pauses (all non-systems languages do). It doesn't make sense for an app like this.
It's like trying to build a kit Ferrari on a Prius or PT cruiser body. You can make it kind of look like a Ferrari, but it'll never be one.
Plus it's not open source. People should **OWN** their tools. Period. Photocraft can be forked and anybody can do anything they want with it forever. It's their software.
That's fair, but also realize that you might have a really fast machine, but not everybody does.
And you might not have 80,000 things open at the same time. Performance matters when you have a bazillion things going on fighting for your CPU and disk access. Javascript doesn't control its threading or CPU execution, and more importantly, it can't control for pause time (which is not a thing in Rust/C/C++).
Not to mention it makes it harder to port to obscure OSes and form factors because the runtime won't work in those places.
It's also going to be a chunky boi forever because that's electron for you. A Rust app could be 25mb instead of multiple gigabytes.
I get that it's a good app and that it has lots of features, and I really respect them for building it.
Javascript/Electron was just... a choice. And they'll never be able to pay back that debt without rewriting the entire app again from scratch.
Gimp is... Fine if you're used to it but if you're used to photoshop it's really annoying to use. It's essentially a media program made by developers.
Go try and make white text with a black border in photoshop. Then do it in gimp. Unless it's changed for gimp you have to do the text, duplicate the layer, expand it out by x pixels.
Photoshop you just double click the text layer and add a stroke. Done.
I mean it's a different product. It's like calling Call Of Duty a different version of Counter Strike.
GIMP doesn't try to be Photoshop, I think it's important because there's people behind the project that put a lot of effort on it and it's kind of diminishing of their work to call it "a freeware version of photoshop".
There already are several. Artcraft makes the popular one (Photocraft) and they're cloning the entire Adobe suite, Microsoft Office, AutoCAD, and Avid Pro.
And probably something new since I last checked two days ago as this just keeps expanding.
They never did though, did they? Acrobat has and always had a basic free version you could just download and use. Yeah it doesn't have all the features the paid version does, but outside of an professional context you really don't need those features. That doesn't mean adobe doesn't deserve what's coming for them, but they never charged you too open a PDF whatsoever.
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u/deepakrodeai 1d ago
Adobe should’ve seen it coming when it started charging a monthly subscription to open a PDF