I’ve always been a big fan of the Adobe PDF format. It’s open, ubiquitous, supports form data, and beats most other document exchange formats hands down. That’s why it’s a little depressing that Adobe’s latest incarnation of the Acrobat Reader is so excruciatingly slow. Thankfully, Joseph Cox’s Adobe Reader SpeedUp comes to the rescue, and once again turns the Acrobat Reader into the speedy application that we all know and love. In a nutshell, it accomplishes this by removing all non-essential plugins when Acrobat is loading. There are also options to restore the original configuration if necessary. While it isn’t new news, I’m posting this because there’s still a quite a few people out there who don’t know about this handy little tweak. Thanks go to Ryan for pointing it out.
Titus Barik
I hack software.
You will notice most people that hate PDF is because they are stuck with a crappy PDF reader like Adobe Acrobat Reader. When I switched to Mac I noticed that the OS X Acrobat Reader was as bad as the one for Windows, but the built-in acrobat reader for OS X, Preview, is really quick. Then later when Quartz Extreme came out PDFs started loading pretty much instantly.
Since then I pretty much use PDF for everything. And it never fails me, every time I hear somebody whining about the PDF format itself is usually because of bad experiences with the Acrobat Reader, not because the format itself sucks.