156 MB
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That's the size of Adobe Acrobat. An app that displays PDF files. 156 million bytes. To contrast, Foxit Reader is 3.4 MB. My head asplode.
cheers Chris Maunder
About fifteen years ago, I was working in a company where Free and Open Source Software was holy, Foxit representet the True Freedom from Commercialism, the one any Free person should use. (It is sort of suprising how some communities directe and limit the freedom of free people, claiming to support that same freedom of choice!) At that time, Foxit had just terrible font rendering, especiall at small sizes. I had to keep Foxit available in case someone looked over my shoulder, but when nobody watched me, I used Acrobat Reader, which had far better font rendering. Over the years since then, I have tried new versions of Foxit. Again and again, I concluded, by watching the same document side by side in Foxit and Reader, that they still haven't learned. I gave up Foxit a few years ago, didn't care to try it anymore. Just a waste of time. Maybe it has improved. Maybe it today can compete with Reader on font rendering in general, and in particular in small sizes. I am not going to waste more time on it. Isn't just every program today in the range of a couple hundred MB, or a couple GB? What is your worry? Can't you afford the disk space? Does it load too slowly? Won't it fit in your RAM space? Adobe Reader never gave me any worries in those directions. It presents the documents for me, in a high quality rendering, causing no problems. So I do not search for any poor man's substitute, even though it is cheaper in terms of disk/memory footprint.
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As per one of my messages above: The realization that FoxIt comes with a Facebook plugin is when I decided FoxIt needed to go. I realize it can be disabled (and you have to *keep* disabling after every update). But when the maker of a PDF reader decides that there has to be a component to integrate (in some fashion - *any* fashion) with Facebook - we can't possibly be on the same page. Myself, I use [Sumatra PDF](https://www.sumatrapdfreader.org/free-pdf-reader.html). It's kinda ugly, but that's a non-issue.
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I have realized one thing: Big companies produce bloated code which need large teams to maintain. Small companies produce just enough code for the apps to work nicely.
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That's the size of Adobe Acrobat. An app that displays PDF files. 156 million bytes. To contrast, Foxit Reader is 3.4 MB. My head asplode.
cheers Chris Maunder
Try https://www.sumatrapdfreader.org/free-pdf-reader.html[^] Free, fast and tiny!
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That's the size of Adobe Acrobat. An app that displays PDF files. 156 million bytes. To contrast, Foxit Reader is 3.4 MB. My head asplode.
cheers Chris Maunder
Open your PDF in Firefox or Edge...
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The trouble comes in when you need to start handling user interactions. 4kB lovely looking world. Then couple MB to handle all that under surface material. Through in a human, oh man. Couple MB to make sure human does not go through wall. At which point to realise the human will try to go through the wall regardless, so a few MB defining what areas okay to walk around. Oh NO, now he needs food. Okay a few MB for digestion and which things okay to eat, some actually needs eating (water), other stuff wont kill them and some stuff just to make them sick and laugh at their pain.
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dandy72 wrote:
It's kinda ugly
By ugly you mean classic don't you? I use Sumatra PDF as well.
I happen to think "classic" (in the Windows Classic sense) looks nice enough. By ugly, I'm thinking about Sumatra going the extra mile using an ugly color scheme. Or may I'm just remembering its installer--I seem to remember some gaudy bright yellow thing. But once it gets going, there's really not much to look at other than the actual content after a PDF is loaded. So it's not something that's permanently in your face.
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That's the size of Adobe Acrobat. An app that displays PDF files. 156 million bytes. To contrast, Foxit Reader is 3.4 MB. My head asplode.
cheers Chris Maunder
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That's the size of Adobe Acrobat. An app that displays PDF files. 156 million bytes. To contrast, Foxit Reader is 3.4 MB. My head asplode.
cheers Chris Maunder
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I happen to think "classic" (in the Windows Classic sense) looks nice enough. By ugly, I'm thinking about Sumatra going the extra mile using an ugly color scheme. Or may I'm just remembering its installer--I seem to remember some gaudy bright yellow thing. But once it gets going, there's really not much to look at other than the actual content after a PDF is loaded. So it's not something that's permanently in your face.
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That's the size of Adobe Acrobat. An app that displays PDF files. 156 million bytes. To contrast, Foxit Reader is 3.4 MB. My head asplode.
cheers Chris Maunder
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Everybody else has worse faults to forgive. Sumatra rarely gets updated, and it could be bug-infested for all I know, but given that it has nothing that'll even *try* to make it talk to the outside world, there's a ton of types of exploits it's not even susceptible to. So...that's a win in my book.
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That's the size of Adobe Acrobat. An app that displays PDF files. 156 million bytes. To contrast, Foxit Reader is 3.4 MB. My head asplode.
cheers Chris Maunder
Inner platform effect. Adobe turned it's reader into a friggin' platform. It has support for JavaScript, ActionScrpt, some 3D stuff and whatnot. You can smuggle rather arbitrary data inside portable "documents". All those features increase code size. And to control all those features, Adobe didn't want to create a safe mode where everything except the document parts is disabled, no, they've added a broker system which again increases the size. I also think that it's ridiculous. They went for complexity for the sake of it and to deal with the consequences, more complexity isn't the best answer. I think Adobe could reduce the complexity, but they don't want to.