Two or three times a week, a window pops up asking me to make Adobe my default pdf reader. Why do they even care? I am not paying them even when I do use it.
The reason I resist is that the Adobe reader does not get along with TeX, which I use extensively. With the reader I use (called Sumatrapdf, if you are interested), if I modify a .tex file and recompile it, the modified file is displayed immediately at the place I left it. The Adobe reader does not allow that. But that is neither here not there. My question is, why does Adobe even care? Enough to keep bugging me.
Because if you don’t open Reader, they can’t up sell you. Do you have some Adobe app in your Startup Apps that’s sending the alert or does it happen during the occasional times you do load Reader?
Adobe is a subscription company. Reader is free advertising for them.
They want Adobe Reader to be the standard… the more people that confuse PDF, the ISO standard, with Adobe, the company, the more likely they are to maintain that brand recognition. I know many people who call them “Adobe files” instead of PDFs, not knowing or caring that Adobe makes other products, or that PDFs can be made and read by many apps.
There are some special PDF features that only Adobe software can easily use, that can only be read by other Adobe software. If you don’t need those special features, there’s no particular reason to have Adobe anything installed at all. Just uninstall all the Adobe stuff on your computer, including Reader, Acrobat, Creative Cloud, etc.
Along with Sumatra, Chrome, Firefox, and Edge can all read PDFs natively already.
Slight hijack if I may. I use Reader, and some ancient no-longer-supported freeware apps for simple pdf manipulation.
I’d like to ditch all that and replace with something free and modern that can read, search, and restructure PDFs at the page level.
And do form filling / saving. By which I mean take a dumb PDF which is just a copy of a paper form, overlay my own typed text, graphics, etc., on top of the “paper”, and save that as an integrated PDF.
I’ve used the free Foxit Reader for years and have been happy with it. My wife’s job requires editing PDF files so she uses Foxit PDF Editor, and raves about it. She has used several PDF editors and says Foxit is the best.
No, I generally use the reader once a year; it is required for filling out the F(u)BAR form on foreign bank accounts. I opened it a second time this year to try to get several scanned pages into a single PDF file. I could not make it work, There is a way of using LaTeX to do that and I did it.