So I was trying out another PDF reader just for the hell of it, and was confused about highlighting (There was a tool in the ribbon bar that I was too stupid to use).
Instead of looking through documentation, I actually tried to use the built-in AI to see what wisdom it could offer a peasant like me.
On the same subject, are there any open source PDF readers you can recommend?
To be fair, I much rather get an ‘I don’t know’ than some random BS answer delivered with confidence. But also, who tf is gonna ask AI to zoom in for them? How lazy does one have to be??
I feel like an AI that can say “I don’t know.” plainly is a great step.
For AI that is, but does not make the product any more desirable.There used to be
F1to help. Now there’sF1to AI?
Oh of course not. TheF#keys are all gone. Now there is theAIbutton.OMG you just nailed what I have been trying to articulate for a while now…
AI is basically the old Help file! It’s about as useful too!
I only remember Microsoft applications’ Help files being as useless as AI.
Other were good.3DsMAX help files were good (yes I learnt it back when I didn’t know Blender was a thing)
Qt Framework help files are great. They even tell me which way of using a thing is desirable and why.
cppreference.com , I have been considering scraping the site and making it available locally as a help file. Maybe they even provide such a thing to download.Either way. all AI would be doing is reading those help files and making more verbose answers.
It clears the Turing test.
Okular from the KDE Project is pretty good imho. It’s cross platform. https://okular.kde.org/
I guess at least it didn’t just make some shit up?
Who wants to summarize pedophiles?
Not really a helpful comment but Acrobat Pro is an AI shitshow these days. Either hangs or crashes on launch while it attempts to give me an AI summary of the content which I didnt ask for. I use Firefox to view now instead, opens instantly without all the bloat nonsense.
Okular
https://invent.kde.org/graphics/okularI saw this post right after looking at an MR, hehe.
And while I don’t see any option to keep the highlighting tool selected, you can set handy shortcuts to almost all actions. In this case, if you have 2 hands free, you can keep a finger on the
1key and press it to activate the highlighter right before using it with the mouse in the other hand.Firefox opens PDFs
I’ve been using Sumatra PDF for years. It’s Windows only, though.
I wish I could updoot (what’s the Lemmy term again?) twice! Sumatra is the GOAT on windows. And as I recently found out can be installed without admin-privileges, meaning I could install it on my work PC and get away from the horrible mess that is Adobe Acrobat!
Xpdf or okular maybe
lol, the PDFgear AI is trash. Although, I would take a second to shout out PDFgear. While I wouldn’t recommend using it as a daily PDF reader, it is a kick-ass PDF editor/file converter. It has literally saved me a number of times. While it’s not FOSS, it is an outstanding piece of forward.
As for basic a basic pdf reader… Firefox or its forks?
Lastly, FBDC (Adobe)
Agreed. We’ve incorporated PDFGear at our workplace for satellite locations that are too small for bundled Adobe packages, and made it available on most employee computers. Solid software for something that would otherwise cost ~$120/head yearly.
Okay Mr Burns, what’s your first name?
I don’t know!
I’ve been using Foxit PDF Reader for several years, works well enough for my needs which are, admittedly, not extreme.
I’ve used foxit, but the biggest issue I have right now is that they pay walled the bookmark feature. I’m trying to sort through hundreds of pages, and bookmarking is pretty much the only thing that keeps me sane.
They silently removed it in their more recent updates and added AI instead.
While ‘pdf24’ sounds like some cheap knock off software, it’s actually an incredible open source tool that can do most pdf editing you might want to do.
There is no paid version.
