Tendo City

Adobe (ex-Acrobat) Reader still manages to scroll horribly slowly and jerkily...

It's not really an issue of computer speed so much as PDF files suck. The thing is, each time you scroll to a new page, the program has to load that new page, as opposed to loading the entire file at once so that you scroll smoothly. Notice how it's jerky around the time you get to that new page? Yeah, it has to load that. The bottle neck is hard disk access really.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. What can PDF do that HTML can't do 100 times better? Why does anyone even bother with PDF?

Because a PDF is an exact image of the page... HTML changes the formatting and stuff. But the format is just so awful... you can't scroll normally, because of how ridiculously slowly it scrolls, so you have to either use the page up/page down keys (which aren't perfect, but are faster than scrolling line by line) or tediously scroll it line by line... either way reading PDFs is a pain.

What frustrates me more is Adobe always asking me for updates. It runs fine the way it is, god damn it.

Except it doesn't run fine the way it is, and none of those stupid updates fix anything. What they DO is repeatedly install the "quick loader" app into the registry so it starts every time Windows starts, and I have to manually remove it to not clutter up my memory with pointless "quick load" apps. No thanks Apple, MOST of the time I'm not USING your stupid program so why would I let it sit resident in memory all that time? I run a CLEAN SHIP here! Toss it in the brig!

Oh and ABF, with certain commands a web page's format can be forced to be static. Further, so long as the layout makes sense, maybe I WANT it to adapt to my screen. And, if you really want an EXACT IMAGE, why not just a web page full of PNG files? They're accurate, small in size, and they load and are manipulated a LOT faster. Why PDF again?

Well, you can highlight the text in a PDF, copy it to another document, fill in lines in PDF forms, search the text (though the search function in PDFs often seems to be as broken as the scrolling is...), etc... you can't do that with static images. If only the things actually WORKED and those benefits were worth it... but as it is I would rather just have the image file with plain text copy for copying and stuff.

Honestly, if web browsers worked like Reader does, the internet would be utterly unusable... scrolling that slow? Who would bother?