Comment by lproven
1 day ago
> nicely-done dedicated viewer
The problem is the edge cases. PDF has lots.
In $DAYJOB-1 we used PDFs as part of the official feedback process for technical documentation: subject-matter experts sent their comments as PDF annotations. Most FOSS viewers can't show them.
Form filling also is a tricky area. Conversion, searching, accessibility tools (screenreaders often can't read PDFs), comments, annotations, editing, all these and more are significant functional weaknesses for the free viewers.
That's setting aside the really fancy stuff, like 3D objects, video, media content, etc.
Even so PDF viewers are big and complicated things so smaller distros pick up tools from alien desktops -- e.g. KDE's Okular, which I find fugly but can handle comments, or GNOME's weird crippled UI in Evince or Papers, with no menu bars etc., but which is Gtk so you find it in many Gtk desktops.
It wasn't hard for the Firefox viewer to outdo 90-95% of the free viewers because the free viewers only do the dead basic stuff, and that kept Acrobat Reader alive on other OSes -- even though the last Linux one is version 9, from 2008.
Oh yeah. Once or twice a year I have to install Adobe Reader to handle some weird edge case around printing, DRM, or the like. I usually uninstall it right afterward.
But for general document reading, Reader's UI has been awful for years. The amount of unnecessary toolbars, popups, upsell offers, and (recently) AI assistant recommendations pile up and block the one thing I actually want the app to do.