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Comment by AnaniasAnanas | Hacker News Reader

Do people still use Adobe reader nowadays? Last time that I tried it in my school's library it took half a minute to load and render my document, and after that the whole UI was unresponsive.

I had a much better experience with Sumatra on windows and Zathura on Linux where my documents open almost instantly.

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Libpoppler has poor support for PDF Forms (especially Unicode[1][2]), embedded animation and 3D extensions. In my opinion these areas are very important in real world document exchange to be ignored (as it is a case for PDF FOSS tools).

[1] https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=17913

[2] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler/issues/463

I have never seen anyone use any of these features in the real world. I presume that embedded animation and 3D extensions are used in art-related fields? If so that would explain my ignorance.

The PDF used to apply for the BSA's Eagle Scout rank needs that stuff. I believe the reason is related to expandable text fields that might need to insert pages into the document. None of the non-Adobe viewers can handle it.

Art and engineering.

I have to use Reader to fill out my state tax forms because they use some modern JavaScript driven system to auto fill that no other reader can handle.

We had the same situation in the UK until recently, thankfully the new API-based system has opened it up to other platforms (eg Xero) and works very well.

A long time ago, when I used PDF exclusively as the format for my slides, I used features like animations and auto play videos embedded within PDFs. Very helpful if you want to give a presentation.

PDF forms are used all over the place from what I can tell -- including a bunch of county government stuff I just had to deal with. No JS was involved though.

I've seen pretty heavy js usage on US gov forms, the most recent example being i9 form you fill out when you get hired.

This is the I-9 I've used before:

https://www.jobs.irs.gov/sites/default/files/wysiwyg-uploads...

Interestingly enough I can't fill it out in Firefox, but I can with Preview.app. Running pdfinfo -js yielded some script, but it basically only looks like it's there as a gatekeeper so that you don't open the file with an older version of Reader. Is there more JS in there that pdfinfo can't extract?

PDF forms are super common for government interactions in many countries. Good luck ignoring those!

.. tried Zathura on LUbuntu just now for the first time ; appears to be a VIM for documents viewing or something.. no interest in Zathura here!

What do you use? I also had good experiences with Okular in the past but I have not tried it in ages. Before moving to zathura I used xpdf and evince but I was not satisfied by them (not to mention that they do not support postscript and djvu).

Zathura does have some vim keybinds but other than that I can't see any similarities.

and just like that, you've convinced me to install it. Different strokes for different folks, I suppose. :)

I was also convinced to install it, although after trying it, it looks more like less for PDFs than vim for PDFs (as many of the commands search or scroll in complex ways, but none of them modify the PDF).

Still, it's interesting to have something like less for PDFs!

IMO mupdf is the real less for PDFs. It is so lightweight and straightforward it makes everything else seem terribly bloated.

Zathura can use mupdf as its PDF renderer (it can also use poppler). I like using the mupdf library through Zathura rather than using the mupdf application, because Zathura has plugins for other file formats too, like PostScript and DJVU, and that way I learn a single set of keystrokes to view all sorts of documents.

You almost make it sound like a bad thing.

Maybe try mupdf instead?

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