Finally dawned on me to ditch Adobe Reader for Preview to deal with PDFs

So, when I switched to Apple from Windows I reflexly installed Adobe Reader, because that's what I had been doing for years. What a hassle it's been. Among other things, statements I downloaded from my bank would view on the screen OK but not print. So I was actually doing screenshots to print them. Then for the past couple of weeks PDF downloads had been freezing in Safari owing to an Adobe Reader function.

Today I deleted Adobe Reader and took a good look at the built-in Preview app. What a dream. All those PDFs that would not download and/or print in Reader now work fine in Safari and Preview. And it seems to have a lot of excellent functionality.

That got me looking around for a third party PDF app, but nothing impresses me more than Preview so far. I don't need to convert PDFs to other formats, and the software running in Apple's OSx does a great job of saving as PDF from a variety of apps. I don't need PDF editing ability either (lot of annotation functions).

Anything else I should be considering?

I've used both extensively - Just removed the Adobe reader myself a couple of weeks ago - don't know what Adobe has been doing, but it was getting to be a downright pitb.

Next it is going to disappear from my primary work Windows machine - it freezes, sits there in a non-responding state for a minute or more at a time whenever I have more than a single pdf open - which is quite often - versions 9 & 10 both worked great, this new version 11 has been a piece of garbage on my machine

Preview is an underrated app that has many undiscovered features, such as use as a PDF reader; it has also become my main basic image editor - for those just getting started w/ Preview, just hit the edit icon (far right - box w/ pencil) which opens up a multi-function tool bar - features include cropping, resizing, addition of arrows & boxes, and text entry - likely some I have not found yet.

As to Adobe PDF reader, I've not used the program in years, even when I was on PCs w/ Windows - I loved Foxit Reader - just took a look @ the link and no Mac OS version, but for those running Windows on their Macs, then worth a look if not familiar w/ the program - fast & sleek. Dave

Good work. Preview is tops and be aware that Annotate in the Tools Menu Bar enables text etc. to be inserted.

I agree that Preview is way better to use than the Adobe reader, but unfortunately there are some "brain dead" sites (mostly government) that insist on the Adobe reader. I've run into that on certain Texas state government sites and even some federal sites. My advice is to keep both on hand, just make sure that Preview is the default PDF reader.

And if you use Windows, keep a copy of the Foxit reader on hand.

For those that DO need more than what Preview provides, I can recommend PDFPen or PDFPenPro from Smile. It lets you do things easily like sign PDFs, black out (redact) portions, edit, fill out forms and so forth. The Pro version lets you *create* PDF forms, tables of content, convert websites to PDF and edit PDF document permissions. Between that and Preview, who needs Acrobat Pro?

I have Preview set as my default PDF reader also, mainly because Adobe Reader is just so... annoying. I keep it around, but I can't call for the life of me why. It seems I ditch it periodically, then eventually run into a situation where I have to have it. But on to the annoying stuff... it still doesn't support the "proper" Mac-native full screen mode that was introduced with Lion. It always opens with thumbnails on the side, as if those tiny things are even useful. If there is an option to disable them, I can't find it. It doesn't even open up fully expanded vertically, even when I closed it previously like that. In fact, that suggests... let me check something...

Yep... Adobe Reader is not even a Mac-native piece of software. It must have been compiled with one of their cross-platform tools. The telling sign of this is that custom keyboard shortcuts added via the System Preferences only work for Mac-native software. I tried to make one explicitly for Adobe Reader and it flat out said it couldn't.