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Acrobat vs Preview

Anonymous
Not applicable
Mac users - what application do you prefer to open your PDF files in?

We've been installing Acrobat Pro for years, but taking a closer look, all the "pro" features that we need are now basically possible with Preview (combine pages, rotate, some light annotation). I would like to ditch Acrobat completely (Preview is just so much more intuitive, versatile, easier to print from, has faster search and is free).

I'm trying to anticipate any deal breakers for switching to Preview - some users claim that Acrobat is "more precise" when displaying PDFs, but I have no idea what that actually means, nor do I have any empirical evidence of it being the case (I suspect it's just a historical thing).
1 REPLY 1
James B
Graphisoft
Graphisoft
I don't see this as a wish, but personally I usually prefer Preview but sometimes I find it incredible slow because I think of it's smoothing techniques (anti-aliasing I guess). So for a complex vector file, panning/zooming is far too slow (and unworkable). Whilst Acrobat doesn't smooth vectors as nicely, it is noticeable faster as a result.

So I mostly use Preview, but it's nice to have Acrobat there as a backup.
James Badcock
Graphisoft Senior Product Manager