Adobe Reader is the first app I don't install on new machines.
It's slow and sluggish, riddled with dark patterns and annoying pop ups, disrespects the user in every possible way, and hides basic editing functionality behind subscriptions.
The trashiest piece of crap software. It's up there with MS Word (which gets progressively more bloated on Mac).
Edit: Added "software" after crap for clarity.
tines · 49m ago
> Adobe Reader is the first app I don't install on new machines.
Bravo. Reminds me of that song that goes something like "When your phone doesn't ring, it'll be me."
hbn · 25m ago
I listen to a prank call show where one of his recurring bits is to call people who listed used items for sale to let them know that he's not interested in purchasing their item.
MortyWaves · 9m ago
Got a link?
maxloh · 2h ago
Adobe Reader (or Acrobat Reader) is still the industry standard for PDF documents, though.
I once found that a PDF file created with OnlyOffice displayed as intended on Chrome, but its embedded font couldn't be recognized or rendered correctly on Acrobat.
I keep Acrobat installed only for verifying the integrity of the PDF files I've created.
exmadscientist · 1h ago
What I miss from Acrobat is its Print dialog. Yes, really, the Print dialog. I've had to install the whole bloated mess just to get that dialog.
Why? PDFs are often print-first documents. Sometimes I need to print them. Sometimes my printer needs a little coaxing to get the perfect output. Acrobat's Print dialog has enough capability to do this immediately, no fuss. Others simply don't. If SumatraPDF had the same capabilities instead of just dumping everything onto the cruddy Win95-era system default Print dialog, I don't think I'd ever use anything else.
pseudosavant · 1h ago
I had to have Adobe Reader installed at my last job because there were official federal and state government PDFs we had to work with that only displayed correctly in Adobe Reader. Opening them in anything else, like Chrome, showed a different single page that said to open it in Adobe Reader.
NoMoreNicksLeft · 46m ago
>Opening them in anything else, like Chrome, showed a different single page that said to open it in Adobe Reader.
So they intentionally broke the documents for anything not Reader?
exmadscientist · 33m ago
There are multiple PDF standards. It is possible to rig up documents that display differently depending on which standards are supported. Acrobat is (or at least used to be) the only thing which truly supports them all.
eduction · 40m ago
100%. I recently took a pdf map from a foreign country, rotated it, and. overlaid English notes using macOS preview. I saved and it opened fine in Preview. But when I tried opening the edited map pdf on iOS in the native pdf viewer it was not rotated so the notes were meaningless. Acrobat Reader for iOS opened it correctly.
So ya looking at binary size alone is not useful. Acrobat may be bloated but there also seems to be some robust code there covering edge cases other readers mess up.
perching_aix · 2h ago
> annoying pop ups
Are pop-ups ever not annoying? :)
Been on mind a lot lately actually, and I basically cannot come up with a situation where popups are actually an unavoidable and proper good choice. Not from a user perspective anyways (from a dev perspective, it's an easy way out and a "good" way to attention grab... and then not hold).
egypturnash · 33m ago
I have a plugin for Illustrator that has several options for helping to make sure your file gets saved regularly. I have it configured to just pop up a polite little warning after fifteen minutes of unsaved work.
Sometimes it grabs focus from whatever I'm doing in Illustrator and this is indeed slightly annoying but it is also useful since I want it to interrupt whatever I'm doing and make me ask myself if I am at a good place to save, and if I'm not, then to save as soon as I am.
Arguably this is still annoying but it is an annoyance I have explicitly asked for, knowing it'll be annoying.
eviks · 1h ago
Maybe when you repeatedly try to do an impossible action and don't understand more subtle UI cues? The the popup would be correctly interfering to explain the frustration of the repeated fails?
diggan · 2h ago
> Are pop-ups ever not annoying? :)
Pressing space to "preview" a file in Finder on macOS is pretty much "non-annoying popup", since you actually want it :)
ethin · 2h ago
The only thing I use Adobe Reader/Acrobat for is converting PDFs to text. Literally that's it, and that's only because, for some PDFs, it's much better than pdftotext is.
robin_reala · 2h ago
If you’re talking Mac, why on earth would you install Adobe Reader? I’m sure there’s a different set of 5% functionality for power users, but Preview does everything I need (including things like signature annotation, real redaction, joining multiple PDFs together) and it does it quickly and with everything enabled for free.
nottorp · 47m ago
Not for power users, for governments :)
I keep the official adobe reader around because it's the only way i can sign some crap for the gov.
It's like a virus, I had to remove update daemons and spam daemons and stuff by hand.
Btw the article says it has "AI" now. Where will it send my tax forms?
staticman2 · 21m ago
Sometimes Mac users need to communicate with Non Mac users and it's helpful to be using the same PDF reader software so you know what you send them is the same as what they'll see.
ilamont · 1h ago
I use Preview for signature annotation, joining PDFs, deleting pages, etc. but in some cases it messes up fillable PDFs - fields aren't aligned properly, or certain math functions won't work.
vondur · 1h ago
I've seen that many forms just don't work properly in Preview. I'm not sure if it's due to custom stuff that only Acrobat does or just features that Apple doesn't want to include in preview. But I can always tell with some forms that they've been filled out in Preview on Mac due to how they mangle it.
diggan · 2h ago
> joining multiple PDFs together
What about joining page 2-3 from PDF A with page 7-23 from PDF B? I remember that being a huge hassle on macOS when I was using it years ago. Think I ended up using some cloud service/website for it since the documents weren't confidential at all.
episteme · 1h ago
Can’t you just drag and drop across preview windows?
JKCalhoun · 1h ago
You can — just drag the thumbnails.
The only downside to this, that I am aware of, is that a new PDF is created (rendered into a new PDF context). That can be lossy in some cases (if there are features that Preview does not support that get "dropped on the floor") and it is possible for the resulting PDF to be larger than the original(s).
diggan · 1h ago
Woah, page-by-page? I wasn't aware of that, I guess I'll give it a try the next time I'm in front of a Mac and need to join PDFs again :)
For those who have an installation of LaTeX: It is pretty easy to use LaTeX for this.
diggan · 1h ago
> It is pretty easy to use LaTeX for this.
Without looking it up the arguments/syntax, how do I do "join page 2-3 from PDF A with page 7-23 from PDF B"?
If it's more than one CLI invocation, easy to remember/find in the shell history and less than 80 characters long, I'm not sure I'd call it easy :)
fooofw · 5m ago
pdfjam [1] uses a LaTeX package under the hood, is included with the TeX Live distribution and acts as a wrapper for a LaTeX package. With this, I believe your example would be:
There are a lot of classic PDF features that are still unimplemented by alternative viewers. For work I have to use Reader for clickable metadata popups that other viewers don't support.
wildzzz · 1h ago
There are two big features that Adobe supports that I just don't see common in other readers. First, the schematic capture application I use will generate a PDF of a schematic that has metadata of each component accessible by clicking it. The schematic will show "R179, 100ohms, 0.125W" but clicking to see the metadata will show a part number along with whatever other data the BOM has. No other reader I've used will show this data. Since the schematic PDF serves as our "immutable" copy that goes into our CRM system, it's nice that you have everything you need without having to open Cadence. I believe this is some sort of JavaScript extension to PDF that is likely incredibly exploitable so this is likely why no one else seems to support it (and why Adobe always seems subject to CVEs).
Second, we use Adobe's comments to markup released drawings or other documents for changes. Then both I and QA put our signatures on the PDF and it's either sent to the factory floor for immediate implementation or sent to the document owner for them to incorporate into a new release. Other readers don't always use comments the same way or don't respect the read only attribute that comments and signatures should have.
D13Fd · 1h ago
Preview is OK and better than Reader. But PDF Expert is excellent in every way, and is a dramatic improvement on both Adobe Acrobat and Preview. It’s so weird that they won’t release a PC version.
insane_dreamer · 44m ago
Love Preview but it doesn’t work with all PDFs. I still have to switch to Acrobat regularly.
behnamoh · 1h ago
You're right, why would anyone use Adobe Reader instead of the built-in Preview on Mac? Though Preview has its own limitations.
JKCalhoun · 1h ago
How does Preview suck? The only thing that comes to mind is that it is missing some advanced PDF features that involve JavaScript (which, to some, might be seen as an asset).
behnamoh · 1h ago
Ever since 3 years ago, every time I open a PDF in Preview it somehow scales it wrong, so swiping left and right jiggles the PDF... (Not that I swipe left/right intentionally, but that happens when swiping up/down). I alway have to zoom out a bit so the document correctly fits the screen and swiping left/right gets disabled.
NoMoreNicksLeft · 40m ago
About 1 in 15 of the pdfs I view in Preview have some sort of "corrupt jpeg" artifacting on the first page. (These are scans of old books, magazines, typically.) There will be a diagonal staircase of green blocks, each what I assume is the DCT 8x8 size going all the way down the page, along with what looks like a missing color channel. The same pdf if opened with Firefox will look fine (so pdfjs gets it right). This has gone on for years, something to do with MacOS's own rendering of pdfs (so trivially switching to another app is unlikely to fix it). I have no idea what this is, I can't even think of a good description with which to google the problem...
tech234a · 2h ago
Ads and many online features can be removed before installation of Adobe Reader by customizing the installer using the Adobe Reader Customization Wizard for Windows [1], where there is an optional labeled "Disable Upsell" [2]. There might also be a version for macOS [3]. It might also just be possible to just directly set the appropriate "FeatureLockDown" options in the registry/preferences in your system [4].
Or I install an alternative where I don't have to do this.
winkelwagen · 2h ago
At this point i don’t trust large programs anymore. Someone recommended to use Lens to manage a k8 cluster. That application was a 600mb install file and if I’m not mistaken double that after installing on a Mac. Desktop software has become so crazy. Meanwhile the blender download is 300mb.
It is not that I’m looking for over optimized software. But a 2gb k8 console doesn’t spark trust in the developers to begin with.
hbn · 14m ago
It's not much better on mobile. I just checked a few apps on my iPhone: Instagram, TikTok, Duolingo are all about 500mb each. And many of these apps are gigabytes when you use them for a bit and it caches things.
I just cleared Snapchat's cache a few days ago, I barely use the app, and it's somehow taking up 5GB on my phone.
Note: log scale on the y axis. Current Adobe reader is 83x bigger than current Sumatra according to the chart.
chrismorgan · 29m ago
I looked at the graph first, and misread the version numbers as sizes in megabytes, because that yielded stuff that wasn’t far off matching the curve linearly. “25.1 MB?” I said. “Huh, I’d have expected a lot more than that, but… maybe it’s just ultra compressed? Somehow? Still seems a bit too small. But maybe this article is actually praising Adobe for keeping it down.”
Then Sumatra being 3.something MB seemed possible, for a well-compressed installer.
Ugh, some of these sizes are absurd. I still remember Zoom basically doubling in a single release, as they put a second entire web browser inside the package.
wanderingstan · 2h ago
Yes. Log scale seems like a poor choice, given that the point is to show the relative size disparity.
StrangeDoctor · 1h ago
For a technical audience, it’s probably one of the better choices, it’s probably a poor one for mass consumption.
A purely linear graph would absolutely crush their pdf installer and the first 15 years of adobe into a flat line
For the purposes of this article, this graph is much more effective at making the point than the log scale one. I think it would have been a better choice to use a graph like this.
Thanks!
ginko · 40m ago
But you can barely tell the growth of sumatrapdf in the non-logarithmic chart. Same for Adobe Reader before 2000 or so.
qualeed · 18m ago
For the purposes of what this post is communicating, I don't think the exact sizes of adobe prior to 2000 or the exact size of sumatrapdf matters at all.
The linear graph instantly communicates:
- sumatrapdf has barely changed size in the same time that adobe's size has grown exponentially
- adobe's crazy growth spike started ~6 years ago
Maybe I'm just dumb, but I didn't realize the graph had a log y-axis at first. Then, once I realized that, I had to spend a bit of time parsing the graph to figure out what it was saying (I don't work with log graphs often at all). And once that was done, the only thing I came away with was "wow, adobe grew a hell of a lot when sumatra didnt", which is the same thing the linear graph told me instantly.
Being able to see that sumatras size remains relatively flat while adobes size growth is practically vertical is all the granularity I care about at a glance. If I want to know exact sizes, I'll dive in deeper.
IshKebab · 2h ago
> for anyone sane would install it via scoop anyway
The lack of awareness here is mind-blowing.
Good post otherwise. Great graph.
kelsey98765431 · 2h ago
I am not super familiar with the windows ecosystem but my understanding is that scoop is a package manager similar to choco or nuget correct? is scoop seen as bloated? thanks
aaviator42 · 2h ago
The lack of awareness is that the vast majority of users are not aware of and don't use scoop (or probably any package manager) on Windows, especially to install GUI apps, and that doesn't automatically make them "not sane".
microflash · 2h ago
scoop is fine since it keeps itself confined to user profile, unlike some other package managers.
sixothree · 1h ago
Doesn't winget prefer to respect the package source's intention?
sixothree · 1h ago
This attitude rubs me the wrong way and sadly pollutes the rest of the article. Not understanding that organizations and people all have different needs is such a blind point of view. Not acknowledging winget or chocolatey much less suggesting using them (or gasp, the web site) to be insane is so wrong-headed.
user_7832 · 2h ago
Tangential, is there any good smooth scrolling PDF viewer (for windows at least), that offers some level of customisation of view? (Like 2 pages side by side, and ideally dark mode and full top to bottom pages with hidden toolbars.)
Adobe Viewer (? not sure of the name) was the only adobe product that had this ability afaik, and while I managed to get an old exe, it's been discontinued unfortunately.
The closest appears to be Xodo PDF with pretty much all features, but it has a ton of popups.
tech234a · 2h ago
Maybe Sumatra PDF?
ZetaRicky · 1h ago
Maybe Okular can be tweaked this way
carlosjobim · 2h ago
Get a Mac and use Preview
carlosjobim · 13m ago
That's some very angry hacker down votes. What's wrong with using the right tool for the job? In another thread I suggested for another poster to sell their Mac and get a PC.
MBCook · 1h ago
I switched to the Mac in ‘04 or ‘05. One thing that immediately impressed me was Preview, Nd how useful it was for PDFs. No more need for Adobe Reader.
I’m not surprised in the least it’s still bloated and terrible. But I don’t think I would have guessed it was pushing the size of a full CD.
What a joke.
Havoc · 2h ago
Worst part is the browsers are now better anyway at filling in forms and signing etc while adobe crap tries to upsell you for that
kevinventullo · 2h ago
What’s the best choice of free desktop PDF Viewer/Editor these days (any OS)?
On Windows I’ve been using PDF-XChange for a decade or so now, but curious if better alternatives have cropped up.
reboot81 · 54m ago
I keep jumping between Preview and Skim.
Preview for simple tasks and editing, Skim for advanced reading (think huge pdfs, where I want to see two parts of the file at the same time).
vjvjvjvjghv · 43m ago
It's funny that the graph uses logarithmic scaling which makes the increase look much less dramatic than it really is. On the other hand, a lot of stock charts use linear scaling which makes more dramatic than they really are. I think it should be the other way.
scrumper · 2h ago
I was pretty shocked by this. I recently bought an old PC laptop to use in my workshop, to run some engine diagnostic software and machine control stuff that doesn't work on Mac. Of course one of the first things it needed was some PDF reading tool so I went for Reader, figuring Adobe's tool would be the least scummy. Installed it and suddenly I was getting McAfee popups? God knows what else it installed along with it. It's horrible. And the shop manual I'm trying to navigate while covered in oil keeps getting obscured by AI popups and ads. F'ing hell.
Maybe I will try this Sumatra thing that the article mentions. I'm coming from Mac where I have Preview built in, and I really don't have the bandwidth to research a goddamned PDF reader. Very disappointed in Adobe.
kotaKat · 1h ago
Literally the same. Went to deploy a Windows 7 laptop for some Motorola software and documentation and went to download the latest Reader executable.
I was shocked when the offered executable for Windows 7 was the 600MB+ release and ended up dumping it for SumatraPDF myself.
8 MB is so much nicer than 600, especially on a laptop with only 1GB of RAM.
iJohnDoe · 2h ago
All browsers open PDF files really well and sometimes better than Acrobat. Just need Chrome, Firefox, Edge, etc.
scrumper · 2h ago
I'm generally looking at multi kilopage manuals where rapid search and navigation are important, and good zooming for diagrams. I didn't even try a browser as the machine is a bit constrained and I just thought it'd be too slow. But I'll try...
alnwlsn · 1h ago
I run into this problem so often that I've been experimenting with rendering all the PDF pages to png images first, and a program that loads all of them on screen at once.
The upside is that it is extremely fast, there is no loading time because all the images are loaded already.
The downside is that it uses an obscene amount of memory. A 500 page manual could run you 8-10Gb of RAM. Also there is no more text highlighting or control-F.
But the fact that even this "works" as well as it does indicates how much worse PDF readers are at this, especially when you get those scanned documents that still have the full images anyways, with lousy or no OCR. They take forever (multiple seconds per page) to load when your in a PDF in chrome and jump somewhere else in the document. Why not go back to image files for those ones to begin with?
sixothree · 1h ago
I've found Sumatra to be okay at best for PDF compatibility. There are definitely times, heck even in the last week, where PDFs have failed to load or loaded as blank pages. But even then it's still my default.
shrubble · 2h ago
The only difference I’ve noticed is the speed of display; but if you’re reading dense technical content that doesn’t matter much. Adobe Reader is faster if needing to view a lot of pages quickly.
D13Fd · 1h ago
Faster than what?
shrubble · 39m ago
Faster than browser based PDF display; I haven’t done head to head testing against muPDF or Zathura however.
HeavyStorm · 27m ago
Log scale makes you miss how bad it is.
MaximilianEmel · 56m ago
I'd really like to see that graph in linear scale!
iJohnDoe · 2h ago
Acrobat is broken on all of our company systems. Opens for a few seconds and then crashes. No amount of uninstalling and other tricks will get it to work. Trash software.
ElectronBadger · 2h ago
Meanwhile...
> apt show zathura | grep Size
Installed-Size: 1,018 kB
Download-Size: 224 kB
SoftTalker · 46m ago
I use xpdf or evince. Never ran into a PDF that one of those couldn't handle. My needs are simple though.
alnwlsn · 2h ago
My favorite PDF reader currently. It's limited, but faster than anything I've tried.
ThomasGlanzmann · 1h ago
Mupdf searches large pdfs much faster. However since I switched to wayland/sway I also use zathura because cut & paste works. Mupdf is an X application but I still use it to search large pdfs. But there is also this plugin but I did not try hard enough to get it running: https://github.com/pwmt/zathura-pdf-mupdf. Under xorg worked cut & paste with mupdf.
RockyMcNuts · 2h ago
Why don't the labels on the points match the scale?
What's wrong with the log scale? IMO it's a good use of it since the size of the installer grew exponentially over time.
patcon · 2h ago
You're looking at the software version number I think. But yes, it's confusing
ginko · 2h ago
The labels on the points are version numbers.
RockyMcNuts · 1h ago
ok, that makes sense.
not indicated, and the general idea of dataviz is to communicate clearly. when you have a number, what it represents should be noted, and the units. if I see a number in that context, I assume it's calling out the value displayed.
the x axis is also a bit off, would ideally plot the date of the release and use a proper time axis.
a title is also good to have, maybe a data table.
sorry to be cranky but those who are downvoting , try to be clear, learn some standards, or stay away from publishing charts. you can even ask AI to clean up your code to conform to a standard. Soft skills are important for an engineer. You need to explain the work in clear, persuasive language and dataviz. or you can be, I'm a super-smart engineer, you figure out what I'm trying to say, I don't need to worry about making your eyes bleed. crikey.
It's slow and sluggish, riddled with dark patterns and annoying pop ups, disrespects the user in every possible way, and hides basic editing functionality behind subscriptions.
The trashiest piece of crap software. It's up there with MS Word (which gets progressively more bloated on Mac).
Edit: Added "software" after crap for clarity.
Bravo. Reminds me of that song that goes something like "When your phone doesn't ring, it'll be me."
I once found that a PDF file created with OnlyOffice displayed as intended on Chrome, but its embedded font couldn't be recognized or rendered correctly on Acrobat.
I keep Acrobat installed only for verifying the integrity of the PDF files I've created.
Why? PDFs are often print-first documents. Sometimes I need to print them. Sometimes my printer needs a little coaxing to get the perfect output. Acrobat's Print dialog has enough capability to do this immediately, no fuss. Others simply don't. If SumatraPDF had the same capabilities instead of just dumping everything onto the cruddy Win95-era system default Print dialog, I don't think I'd ever use anything else.
So they intentionally broke the documents for anything not Reader?
So ya looking at binary size alone is not useful. Acrobat may be bloated but there also seems to be some robust code there covering edge cases other readers mess up.
Are pop-ups ever not annoying? :)
Been on mind a lot lately actually, and I basically cannot come up with a situation where popups are actually an unavoidable and proper good choice. Not from a user perspective anyways (from a dev perspective, it's an easy way out and a "good" way to attention grab... and then not hold).
Sometimes it grabs focus from whatever I'm doing in Illustrator and this is indeed slightly annoying but it is also useful since I want it to interrupt whatever I'm doing and make me ask myself if I am at a good place to save, and if I'm not, then to save as soon as I am.
Arguably this is still annoying but it is an annoyance I have explicitly asked for, knowing it'll be annoying.
Pressing space to "preview" a file in Finder on macOS is pretty much "non-annoying popup", since you actually want it :)
I keep the official adobe reader around because it's the only way i can sign some crap for the gov.
It's like a virus, I had to remove update daemons and spam daemons and stuff by hand.
Btw the article says it has "AI" now. Where will it send my tax forms?
What about joining page 2-3 from PDF A with page 7-23 from PDF B? I remember that being a huge hassle on macOS when I was using it years ago. Think I ended up using some cloud service/website for it since the documents weren't confidential at all.
The only downside to this, that I am aware of, is that a new PDF is created (rendered into a new PDF context). That can be lossy in some cases (if there are features that Preview does not support that get "dropped on the floor") and it is possible for the resulting PDF to be larger than the original(s).
Without looking it up the arguments/syntax, how do I do "join page 2-3 from PDF A with page 7-23 from PDF B"?
If it's more than one CLI invocation, easy to remember/find in the shell history and less than 80 characters long, I'm not sure I'd call it easy :)
[1] https://github.com/pdfjam/pdfjam
Second, we use Adobe's comments to markup released drawings or other documents for changes. Then both I and QA put our signatures on the PDF and it's either sent to the factory floor for immediate implementation or sent to the document owner for them to incorporate into a new release. Other readers don't always use comments the same way or don't respect the read only attribute that comments and signatures should have.
[1]: https://www.adobe.com/devnet-docs/acrobatetk/tools/Wizard/in...
[2]: https://www.adobe.com/devnet-docs/acrobatetk/tools/Wizard/on...
[3]: https://www.adobe.com/devnet-docs/acrobatetk/tools/AdminGuid...
[4]: https://www.adobe.com/devnet-docs/acrobatetk/tools/PrefRef/W...
I just cleared Snapchat's cache a few days ago, I barely use the app, and it's somehow taking up 5GB on my phone.
Then Sumatra being 3.something MB seemed possible, for a well-compressed installer.
Ugh, some of these sizes are absurd. I still remember Zoom basically doubling in a single release, as they put a second entire web browser inside the package.
A purely linear graph would absolutely crush their pdf installer and the first 15 years of adobe into a flat line
Thanks!
The linear graph instantly communicates:
Maybe I'm just dumb, but I didn't realize the graph had a log y-axis at first. Then, once I realized that, I had to spend a bit of time parsing the graph to figure out what it was saying (I don't work with log graphs often at all). And once that was done, the only thing I came away with was "wow, adobe grew a hell of a lot when sumatra didnt", which is the same thing the linear graph told me instantly.Being able to see that sumatras size remains relatively flat while adobes size growth is practically vertical is all the granularity I care about at a glance. If I want to know exact sizes, I'll dive in deeper.
The lack of awareness here is mind-blowing.
Good post otherwise. Great graph.
Adobe Viewer (? not sure of the name) was the only adobe product that had this ability afaik, and while I managed to get an old exe, it's been discontinued unfortunately.
The closest appears to be Xodo PDF with pretty much all features, but it has a ton of popups.
I’m not surprised in the least it’s still bloated and terrible. But I don’t think I would have guessed it was pushing the size of a full CD.
What a joke.
On Windows I’ve been using PDF-XChange for a decade or so now, but curious if better alternatives have cropped up.
Maybe I will try this Sumatra thing that the article mentions. I'm coming from Mac where I have Preview built in, and I really don't have the bandwidth to research a goddamned PDF reader. Very disappointed in Adobe.
I was shocked when the offered executable for Windows 7 was the 600MB+ release and ended up dumping it for SumatraPDF myself.
8 MB is so much nicer than 600, especially on a laptop with only 1GB of RAM.
The upside is that it is extremely fast, there is no loading time because all the images are loaded already.
The downside is that it uses an obscene amount of memory. A 500 page manual could run you 8-10Gb of RAM. Also there is no more text highlighting or control-F.
But the fact that even this "works" as well as it does indicates how much worse PDF readers are at this, especially when you get those scanned documents that still have the full images anyways, with lousy or no OCR. They take forever (multiple seconds per page) to load when your in a PDF in chrome and jump somewhere else in the document. Why not go back to image files for those ones to begin with?
> apt show zathura | grep Size
Installed-Size: 1,018 kB Download-Size: 224 kB
Looks like a chart crime scene
not indicated, and the general idea of dataviz is to communicate clearly. when you have a number, what it represents should be noted, and the units. if I see a number in that context, I assume it's calling out the value displayed.
the x axis is also a bit off, would ideally plot the date of the release and use a proper time axis.
a title is also good to have, maybe a data table.
sorry to be cranky but those who are downvoting , try to be clear, learn some standards, or stay away from publishing charts. you can even ask AI to clean up your code to conform to a standard. Soft skills are important for an engineer. You need to explain the work in clear, persuasive language and dataviz. or you can be, I'm a super-smart engineer, you figure out what I'm trying to say, I don't need to worry about making your eyes bleed. crikey.
https://www.datavizstyleguide.com/
https://www.amazon.com/Better-Data-Visualizations-Scholars-R...
https://guides.library.jhu.edu/datavisualization/scientific
https://github.com/rougier/scientific-visualization-book
edit: I'm late...