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Adobe Acrobat Reader
- Thread starter paulbaker
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Advantages to Reader vs. Preview: Handles forms much better, browser plugin for in-browser-window PDF viewing, supports some fancier PDF features that Preview doesn't, WAY more settings. Supports digital signatures. Seems to render some complex PDFs faster than Preivew.
Disadvantages: Much more memory-hungry, launches significantly slower. If you don't want or need any of the fancy features, the simplicity can also be a definite advantage. It can also, in some cases, save a copy of a filled-out PDF form that Adobe Reader won't (Adobe wants you to buy the full version to save filled-out forms).
There's nothing wrong with either as far as I'm concerned, it just depends on what you want. If you just want to see a product manual now and then, Preview will probably handle it better and more efficiently--launches fast, not hefty on the memory requirements.
If you like the extra features of Adobe Reader, want the browser integration (though I think you can use that without having Reader be the default viewer), or prefer the interface, Reader has the edge.
It's free and doesn't install anything low-level other than the browser plug-in (which you can remove if you don't like), so I'd say try both, set whichever you prefer as the default for PDFs.
Disadvantages: Much more memory-hungry, launches significantly slower. If you don't want or need any of the fancy features, the simplicity can also be a definite advantage. It can also, in some cases, save a copy of a filled-out PDF form that Adobe Reader won't (Adobe wants you to buy the full version to save filled-out forms).
There's nothing wrong with either as far as I'm concerned, it just depends on what you want. If you just want to see a product manual now and then, Preview will probably handle it better and more efficiently--launches fast, not hefty on the memory requirements.
If you like the extra features of Adobe Reader, want the browser integration (though I think you can use that without having Reader be the default viewer), or prefer the interface, Reader has the edge.
It's free and doesn't install anything low-level other than the browser plug-in (which you can remove if you don't like), so I'd say try both, set whichever you prefer as the default for PDFs.
Thanks for the suggestion. I tried it for a day and have already uninstalled it. It scrolled through documents terrible compared to preview, and I don't need any really advanced functionality since 90% of my PDF's are scanned files that people email me.
My program of choice for viewing PDFs is PDFView (http://pdfview.sourceforge.net/). It has the speed of Preview, but with more functionality.
I'm still on PPC macs, so I vastly prefer Schubert-It as my plugin... (which works in Firefox and Safari, but not on Intel Macs unless you run your browser, ugh, under Rosetta).
My understanding is that, in addition to Makosuke's excellent analysis, the biggest nuisances about Windows Acrobat Reader (its infuriating behavior of requiring multiple reboots with constant minor upgrades and intermittently popping under a warning dialog behind active windows without focus or a taskbar item, leading it to seem as if Reader has crashed the browser....) are absent in OS X.
Still, probably because I don't use those advanced features often (I'd love to use PDF forms, but people insist on sending annoying Word forms where they used underscores or underline spaces to generate blanks and there's no easy way to fill them out
)... I have never in four years installed Acrobat on my Macs, nor have I really even thought about doing so.
My understanding is that, in addition to Makosuke's excellent analysis, the biggest nuisances about Windows Acrobat Reader (its infuriating behavior of requiring multiple reboots with constant minor upgrades and intermittently popping under a warning dialog behind active windows without focus or a taskbar item, leading it to seem as if Reader has crashed the browser....) are absent in OS X.
Still, probably because I don't use those advanced features often (I'd love to use PDF forms, but people insist on sending annoying Word forms where they used underscores or underline spaces to generate blanks and there's no easy way to fill them out
)... I have never in four years installed Acrobat on my Macs, nor have I really even thought about doing so.