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- cross-posted to:
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Reader would work for like 90% of people, but no, everyone needs Standard or Pro because reasons.
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This reminds me of my all time favourite lost redditor that asked for a Adobe Acrobat alternative on r/freeuse (which is not about free software but very nsfw). They were extremely helpful though.
r/inflation never seemed to know if it was for Furries or for Economists
r/trees was absolutely sure what they were about. As was r/marijuanaenthusiasts.
/trees only happened because there was a power tripping mod that was banning everyone from /weed, and the arborists hadn’t shown up yet cause the Digg/Slashdot migrations hadn’t happened yet, and when they did show up they decided to be snarky about it, lol.
That’s hilarious.
There was apparently a significant population of German car mechanics on /r/BBW as well.
lost redditors was great fun, I remember that /r/Burial (about the musical artist) used to keep a running count of confused morticians that would wander in.
What’s the significance of BBW for German car mechanics? Googling didn’t help
BBW is “big beautiful women”. BMW is a German car make.
So every so often, you’d get someone whose 3 series wouldn’t shift out of park getting advice from horny men who love fat women.
Got it!
Conversely, IT is arguing about a $90 license on an employee that costs 80k. If it saves them 2 hours of productivity over the course of the year, it’s an even trade, wouldn’t you say?
Yeah but those $90 savings make IT management look good, and that 80k/year doesn’t come out of IT’s budget. Also the productivity loss can’t objectively be measured or will just be blamed on the employee.
I know this is more sarcasm rather than serious justification, but sadly I agree that it’s all true.
It’s definitely not sarcasm
Pisses me off no end when companies cheap out on IT equipment. I work in a place where a large number of us will be on £35 - £55k, yet the IT budget for each of us is less than 1% of our salary over 3 years.
It’s crazy. Don’t employ professionals then give them low end enthusiast gear.
I blame accounting. Although I also think that Acrobat’s price is BS.
If it was us, we wouldn’t have to be fighting for the licenses either.
It’s usually some high level IT exec who thinks they’ll get a bonus if they shave off $5K in expenses.
It took me months to get them to allow it even though I need it. And in the end, they gave me Creative Suite for some reason.
I worked for a small multinational (20.000ish employees).
The licensing department saved about 3 mio USD/year when they started going at license pinching.
Yeah, this penny pinching on licenses is pretty absurd. I promise you that it hardly affects the bottom line.
$90? Where can I get Adobe Acrobat for $90? Standard is 14.99 per month! I’d buy that shit all day if it was a one time fee of $90.
It’d probably $90/year, not a one-time fee. Which is still a lot better than monthly, but probably only available to businesses/bulk licence buyers
No shit man. I just pay for my own. Ain’t worth arguing with IT. Saved me a shit ton of time reliably converting and editing PDFs.
There is a free PDF editor called Sejda, it might do what you need and save you some money.
This looks very promising for personal use, but as it is web-based it is almost certainly not HIPAA compliant which is a necessity for several professions.
Random aside, I’m always mildly amused because HIPAA (the US medical legislation) and FIPPA (the British Columbia privacy legislation) have similar requirements in many cases. :)
There is a downloadable version, that’s what I use. https://www.sejda.com/desktop
Thank you
The basic pdf editing options you can find in most browsers (including edge) is more than enough for most people
If you have a mac… well, preview is bloody amazing
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Preview > Acrobat Reader. It’s not even a contest.
Imo its not that hard to beat acrobat reader, i hate it!
Preview basically opening most of what you throw at it, with editing options for many is soooo good
Wait… I can edit in Preview?
The best pdf reader for me is Okular. It is free, open source and certified with the German “Blauer Engel” for it’s energy efficiency (as first software ever btw)
Blauer Engel
I don’t think it’s more “power efficient” than other pdf readers (Like Sumatra). It looks like the only reason it got that award is because it’s German software. I’m saying that as Austrian. Super weird thing to give an award to.
How would they even measure it? Pdf readers use close to zero CPU. And using more or less RAM has nothing to do with power usage.
I would bet a million that Adobe is very resource heavy in comparison to Okular. So while it is using almost nothing, everything adds up
Pdf readers use close to zero CPU
You say this but devs are making webpages that max out cpu usage when nothing is actually happening to render the webpage, it’s just rerendering stuff unnecessarily because hardware is cheap and no one is calling them on it.
Why would any software be different? It’s super easy to write shitty software, and there ought to be incentives to write it even better than “normal”, which is exactly what this award sounds like.
Show me a single website that “rerenders stuff” all the time to cause CPU spikes. That’s simply not how websites work at all. Websites can’t even max out your CPU usage with normal methods as JavaScript is single-threaded. The only way to max out the CPU in your browser is web workers, but they have nothing to do with website rendering.
Even Adobe Acrobat Reader, which counts as very resource intensive usually, goes to 0% CPU usage after you opened up a pdf and you just let it sit there.
Doubling down eh? No, I will not reveal the company I work for here. Examples would include websites that use webgl and are poorly written. Or even just websites with less than optimal js. Everyone has had the experience of shitty JavaScript freezing their browser and you’re not an exception. Why pretend you’ve not seen that? Why would you be so adamantly wrong about something you clearly know zero about?
I have been a web developer for many years. Also, I’ve used computers more than 2 weeks.
You truly show your ignorance by claiming that software simply doesn’t use unnecessary resources. That is absolutely laughable.
If you’ve ever written a single line of code for money, I feel sorry for your clients.
Also I find it especially moronic that you think anything short of maxing cpu isn’t worthy of a glance. Developers used to build fully functional applications with 1 millionth the resources yet opened in seconds. According to you, it’s impossible to avoid things like Photoshop taking 10 seconds to load on very new hardware
Nobody asked about what company you work for, no clue where you got that from.
I can’t think of a single website I use on the daily that uses webgl, if it’s not a web game or something, most websites are relatively light weight and static once loaded. Hell, even Reddit (which is notorious for being slow) doesn’t use any resources after it’s done loading. There is no website that constantly re-renders stuff out there, except it’s a shitty niche project. Makes no sense at all, you load HTML, CSS and JavaScript, but you don’t re-render the DOM all the time except when things change.
CPU is the most important stat if we actually talk about energy savings. Using more RAM costs pretty much zero energy. GPU rarely used on the web (except we go back to 3D rendering or watching videos). If you use up actual wattage it’s mostly CPU related.
Yes, current applications are slow and bloated, but the original conversation was about pdf viewers. And even the most shitty pdf viewer I can think of uses no extra power after opening the pdf (pretty much zero CPU usage, just some RAM, which again is “free” in terms of power consumption). So if you compare pdf viewers I’d bet pretty much any of them could earn that reward if they applied for it.
I could have easily given an example of a web page that uses a ton of CPU while idle. But a contractor built it on may company’s website years ago and it’s not a priority to fix it. While I don’t know or care if it truly “maxed” the CPU, that wasn’t the point at all. The point was that it was a WEB PAGE, which a lot of people noticed that while sitting practically idle (a very simple animation playing) caused laptop fans to spin up like crazy.
But my slight exaggeration (using the word “max”) aside, the point was that any software can run inefficiently and that even small differences could add up to significant energy waste when deployed to millions of users.
I’m not sure why you’d make a claim that a PDF viewer could never be inefficient enough to matter. Of fucking course it could. Unless you have completed a study proving otherwise, you’re just talking out of your ass, and it’s a really weird hill to die on.
Mate, we are talking about international / widely used websites here. Of course you can build a shit website that eats up resources, I can do that in a single line of code. But the average website out there doesn’t burn up resources for no reason at all, most content is static and just sits there after being loaded.
Open up any PDF viewer you like, whatever you think is the heaviest or shittiest one (Probably Adobe). Load a big pdf file, now check the resource usage. It’s going to be absolutely nothing, any Electron app (like Discord) eats up way more RAM and CPU time.
Now get out with your straw man argument, you derailed this whole conversation by going from pdf readers to websites with this comment:
You say this but devs are making webpages that max out cpu usage when nothing is actually happening to render the webpage, it’s just rerendering stuff unnecessarily because hardware is cheap and no one is calling them on it.
You don’t know what you’re talking about
Now you’re just being dumb and argumentative.
Yes and no, the people making Okular likely applied because they are German, they got the award because they applied for it, and met the Award criteria. The award criteria seems to me fairly general in its approach to software testing, but resonably rigorous as well, the amount and type of measurements required also seem resonably useful for answering roughly the question: “Is the tested software energy and resource efficient”, it can be found here
Presumably it means it has been actually audited by a third party for wasteful cycles, etc. It doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s cheaper to run than another app, just that it’s cheaper than some objective standard.
Not advocating for the use of that software, but…very easy to measure.
Evince for me. I can print off pages from songbooks I have in e-book form. Evince don’t care about no drm
Okular is awesome
I’m loving Librera these days. Full version is free on F-Droid.
“Hate” is a strong word for my feelings towards Adobe Acrobat reader. But I really don’t like it when I start it to view a pdf, you know the thing it is designed to do, and I have a weird popup, then a toolbar on the right with tools I can’t use cause they’re premium and a toolbar on the left and a toolbar at the top underneath the standard windows toolbar. I just wanna view the pdf man (also weird snapping when you scroll over a page). Haven’t found anything nice yet that just works. I don’t want to use Edge or a browser to view them and mupdf is too light weight. Would really like an evince for windows
Foxit reader, trust
I second this.
Looks like Foxit is freeware with a subscription option for enterprise deployment packages. Not ideal.
Maybe Okular? It’s from the KDE project and it’s on the Windows store.
Foxit has a subscription plan if you need advance tools, it’s perfectly fine (and customizable) if you want to use the standard plan… No ads, no popups, nothing except your pdf and a lot of features you can use for free. You should give it a try, it’s really good.
Ehhh. Still proprietary. I’d rather use open source tools, even if it takes a slight functionality hit.
Try pdf xchange
There’s also SumatraPDF which seems pretty similar to Evince, though I don’t know the latter
I’ll second SumatraPDF. Lightweight, easy.
Okular is quite nice and I believe has a windows port (though I’ve not tried it). https://okular.kde.org/download/
Try Sumatra, PDF24 and or Foxit Reader. There are plenty of alternatives for a pdf reader, and a lot of them are even faster than acrobat!
It’s annoying AF. But there is an option in the settings to open as it was last closed. So open a file, minimize all those toolbars, save the file, close the file, open a file. Should be good to go.
“Go to Edit > Preferences > Documents, and then select Remember current state of Tools pane.”
Wondershare PDFelement is pretty respectable.
Yeah, you could of course use Firefox or another cheap or free option. Regardless, it all boils down to people don’t like change. The cost of adobe is very high and staff doesn’t realize or care. Quantify the bottom line to superiors and get muscle behind your change order.
Please don’t give Adobe money.
They’re not Oracle. But they’re trying.
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You can view and edit in Firefox, use that and I bet the number of people who don’t need acrobat would jump to 99%
May I recommend SumatraPDF? It’s so fast at loading and rendering the document
It’s not a PDF editor though. I love Sumatra to death and will attest it loaded my 1000+ page college textbook in an instant. Also auto divided the chapters and subsections into their own table of contents and I could Ctrl+F the entire textbook in seconds.
Unfortunately it still can’t sign and edit PDFs.
Big fan of Sumatra.
It’s nice for comic books too.
+1 for free and open source software, this program just works
LibreOffice Draw does nice editing as well, I’ve just learned that recently
And PDF Arranger is very simple for rearranging, rotating, inserting, removing and rotating pages
It makes me sad but Adobe is the only game in town for powerful PDF editing. It’s a shame no open source project seems to be there.
It’s not open source but I think foxit is even more powerful if we are only talking about pdf editing.
God, this is so true. Too many idiots that wanted a full suite license just to print documents.
I see people confuse ‘annotate’ and ‘edit’ a lot. They don’t even try.
We do have Reader at work. When I didn’t have to fill in something for a week or two, I always click the wrong thing (edit) first, have to close down the useless popup and then go to the right thing (annotate).
The UI is built to make you think that having the paid version is the only way to write something inside all those forms.
Look, say what you will, but I kinda like using Edge as a pdf reader. Its out-of-the-box PDF markup features really speak to me, I don’t know why.
Foxit was good several years ago - no clue about recently
It’s just as garbage nonsenseware as Adobe. I installed it recently on my friend’s PC and holy shit, whatever happened to that small program. It went to the bin and Sumatra was installed instead.
What’s it doing now? I’ve had it installed for a few years, and other than trying to install a trial of its premium software when it updates, I haven’t noticed anything. I’m wondering if it’s because I’ve turned something off and forgotten about it.
They ditched create-from-scanner function in some of updates of free version, or hid it somewhere. I treasured my old exe where it’s still accessible.
Ah, ok, that’s not something I’d ever used, so I didn’t know it had been removed.
I don’t remember exactly, but it’s definitely quite a large installer with a lot of “extras” and IIRC they’re pushing some cloud service too. I guess it’s standard these days tho.
I saved the last version before they took out the pdf printer. Still not an editor. Used bluebeam for that. Though that was also bought out and being run into the ground.
