I Hate Acrobat

Summary

Why? Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable. Of course there are alternatives, specifically bad ones. FoxIt is slow and non-customizable. Chrome/Firefox kinda works as a PDF reader, but is lacking in the feature department. On linux there is (at least) one non-bad PDF reader. Zathura is amazing with the MuPDF backend. However it only works on X11/Xorg and thus Linux. I use Wayland and Windows. Zathura-2? If I could just reach parity with the features from Zathura it would be the perfect program for me. And perhaps I could even create a more approachable program for others as well. Zathura is keyboard focused, featuring a modal navigation system and command line, just like in Vim. I love that, but it’s not for everyone, and it’s not even always for me depending on what I’m doing. Mouse controls are great, when they are optional. Hot reloading PDFs when they change on disk is a killer feature as well. But it can be pushed even further. What if you switch to another file in your editor? Wouldn’t it be nice if the PDF reader could switch with the editor, automatically? A config for customizing key bindings is a no-brainer. It also comes with a dark-mode, not just for the interface but also for the PDF itself. Last but not least, it would be nice if the PDF reader could show PDFs. If I could manage to implement this rather small set of features, where the last feature is the most difficult by far. Then I could go on reading PDFs as a happier man than before. PDF rasterisation I read somewhere once that problems should always be tackled in the order from most to least difficult if you’re serious about solving them. Makes enough sense to me. Climb the mountain first and coast downhill afterwards, ticking off features with increasing speed and decreasing effort as you grow tired of the project. Parsing the gigantic PDF specification and transforming decades worth of revisions into a bunch of pixels is certainly that most difficult task. Fortunately, this herculean ...