Every pdf document its own pdf viewer style?!

[evamaria]

I have Adobe Viewer X / 10, and all my pdf documents (wheter in my browser, directly from the web, or from my harddisk, meaning I stored them to my harddisk, at some time, from the web, meaning all these documents are of third-party origin, not created by myself) are by default opened by this Adobe viewer.

Now my problem is, every one of these documents opens in this Adobe viewer, not in any standard appearance of this viewer, but in all sorts of different views and with all sorts of different settings, so it's evident that pdf documents have the ability to do this, meaning to override any default settings of your Adobe viewer in order to force their own settings, and most of the time, this is very ugly, and I have to switch settings (if this is even possible to begin with, which is not the case when they open directly in my browser, or do I overlook the possibility to do this otherwise here?) then, before reading the documents in question, meaning to make the view "full screen" (not really "full screen view", without caption bar, but a maximized window), fiddling around with the menu (which can appear in many variants or not appear at all), with the table of contents (which may appear or not, and in numerous flavors), and perhaps even (a real pain but worthwile when you want to read a long document) with the setting that makes the pgup/pgedn  keys move the view by a real page.

All this is a real pain, so most of the time, I avoid reading pdfs when not really necessary.

So I have two questions:

Is there a way to have this better, with Adobe viewer X / 10, or with the newest one, 11, or even by reinstalling the old one, version 9?

Is there another pdf viewer (in its free, or in its paid version - I know all these viewers in principle, meaning I know of their existence, know their names, but did not install / try them) where I could get rid of these problems, and where the settings of the viewer would override the respective pdf document settings, instead of their settings overriding the settings of the viewer? I also would be interested in knowing if this is possible with several of such viewers, meaning they might be different in other respects, so perhaps I even would be able to get rid of these problems, by going away from the Adobe viewer,  AND have the choice in installing / buying an alternative?

[tomos]

I mainly work with PDF's from one or two sources so dont have to deal with this problem much.

Have you tried these two options in preferences? this from "X" (version 10.1.5)

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[evamaria]

Thank you very much, Tomos.

In fact, my 4 above settings are as yours, so these don't have any effect on the problem. I should add two things:

1 - For every such "web pdf" document, even the size of the respective, default (by the respective document) "middle-sized" view (meaning not full screen, not maxizimed, not minimized, just the respective "open the pdf" command view) is slightly different from pdf to pdf, and has nothing to do with the respective page size of the document in question, meaning that it's not slightly larger or smaller, in order to allow for a complete view of the respective page size (such a behaviour would be totally ok and logical), but many a time, it's even a little bit longer in height, so showing a part of page 2, too, or the other way round, is a little bit shorter, so that even page 1 is not shown entirely, even though on my screen (1280x1024), there would be "room" for this, so this is really amateurish, and for a version X / 10, that's a real shame!

2 - In order to verify your indications, I tried to open Adobe Viewer, when at the same time I had open one of these "third party pdfs" (not shown properly). So Adobe Viewer did not open a second time, but said it was "installing" Adobe Viewer !!! (And it asked me to close that pdf there, which I did.)

Now an "install" program overtook, doing some "settings" for some 30 sec., in fact and obviously "repairing" my Adobe Viewer installation, and then the Adobe Viewer opened (empty, as expected): But with the size of that last-viewed, not properly-displayed  pdf I had closed on request of the Adobe Viewer "installation" program, some seconds ago.

Interesting here: These settings were replicated, obviously, but as said, in general, every such document is opened in its  "individual" (but not "proper", adequate, see my point 1 here) size, so in general it's not that simply any such document stores its (improper anyway) "view  window size" even for the next to be displayed pdf, but then, SOME might do this.

In any case, it's totally chaotic, and a real pain, and I cannot say how much I'm fed up with this Adobe Viewer behavior, so getting rid of this sh** would be certainly the very best solution, but then, I'm afraid to lose some hours with trialing 5 alternative viewers, without finding something better in the curse of doing this (all the more so with the problem that in any of the alternatives, I could cause the problems there by my own, erroneous settings, and mistakenly discard a viewer that would work fine, had I known the proper settings there), hence my asking for your experiences, with Adobe Viewer, and with the alternatives. This being said, it's always possible that my Adobe Viewer settings ain't correct!

[tomos]

In fact, my 4 above settings are as yours, so these don't have any effect on the problem.

hi evamaria, I wasnt very clear there
I wasnt actually recommending my settings, I was wondering if unticking those settings, in particular [Allow documents etc etc] would help any.

[evamaria]

Thank you very much again, Tomos, that was dumb of me! (I just checked that they were yours, without taking any further interest in them, or really read them to begin with!)

In fact, deselecting the two settings solves my problems partly, I now have the menus displayed in every case (I hope, and except when the pdfs are displayed directly in my browser, I fear, meaning before downloading them in order to just be able to read them properly!!!), and it's always in maximized window, so that's a real step forward, thank you very much again!

But I'm far from being really happy with Adobe Viewer, and from my further tries (I tried before, too), it doesn't seem I can do anything about these problems here, hence my continued search for a better alternative:

In the Settings - View - Page Display, you can NOT disable "enable scrolling" - you only can set this for any given document, one by one, when viewing it, and every new document disables your previous try to disable this, then. This is VERY BAD! In fact, this "scrolling" means whenever you press pgdn, you find yourself at any unwanted position of the page or next page, but the (wanted) disable option makes behave the pgdn key work this much better way:

It goes to top of next page; to the rest of that page (if it wasn't displayed in full previously); to top of next page; as before; as before. In practice, this means, you can browse your pdfs page-wise, by two such key pressings, or  even, by setting the zoom accordingly (and whenever the original font isn't too small), by one key pressing (one key pressing, one new page, this is ideal (ok, it would be perfect if it was the rightarrow key, not the pgdn key) and of course should be the dafault and not only be available by resetting this in the depths of the menu for every new pdf again and again); the default "allow scrolling", on the other hand, means you never know where to read on after pressing pgdn, since there is always some overlapping, and not even by a fixed amount of pixels or text lines; this greatly interferes with normal reading.

And there is another problem, it does NOT seem to be possible to have, by default, pdfs displayed in "full height", meaning to have Adobe Viewer set the zoom in a way that the height of one page just fills the height of the maximized window (as before, I'm not speaking of "full screen", meaning without menus, here).

In practice, this would mean that you could read most pdfs "full page" since the font of most pdfs is so big that its original size is much too big for the screen, and so big that it's perfectly possible to have it resized to a bit less of 1024 pixels per page (maximized window less the caption and the start bar below), AND it could be read without problems, and if not, in exceptional cases, there would always be the poossibility to make the zoom bigger.

But it's even in the help file: "Default Layout And Zoom
Page LayoutSets the page layout used for scrolling when you first open a document. The default setting is Automatic. The Page Layout setting in File > Properties > Initial View overrides this value.
ZoomSets the magnification level for PDF documents when they are first opened. The default setting is Automatic. The Magnification setting in File > Properties > Initial View overrides this value.
Note: Two conditions can affect page layout and zoom. 1) Someone has already set an individual PDF to a different initial view in File > Properties. 2) You have the option Restore Last View Settings When Reopening Documents selected in Edit > Preferences > Document category." (Number 2 here would not be of any help, since it just means reopening of the SAME document, and within the SAME session.)

And this means in practice that for almost every pdf, I have to fiddle around either with the zoom, or with the "Allow scrolling" setting, or, in most cases, with both, and that's really awful, it's just that I now can do without the "maximize window", first of all.

So Adobe Viewer is really a very bad thing (or did I overlook some setting, again? but I fear not), so a better alternative would be more than welcome.

Of course, this leaves the question why most people creating pdfs do not see these problems on the "consumer" side when they create them, with so bad settings (then overriding anything you could set in Adobe viewer).

Again, the way Adobe viewer does it (in version X, so what about 11?), means you have to fiddle around with EVERY document, for zoom, and for scrolling setting, when with a viewer where your settings would not be overridden by "individual" document settings, you would have to fiddle around with just SOME documents. (Your experience with regards to font sizes may vary if you have lots of scientific pdfs, all with rather tiny fonts, but for most "consumer" pdfs, the problem is as described above, and the scrolling setting problem persists in any case.)

[evamaria]

When you set the zoom to a value slightly less than "windows height", pgdn will jump from page to page even though the "scroll" setting is "on"; so this setting is of real value only (and then you need to fiddle with it) whenever the (necessary) zoom value is bigger (meaning the original font being too small) than a value that would allow for viewing one whole page per screen.  There is no such preset "windows height" value, though, so you have to click on the "-" button several times in order to get there, and then perhaps even enter some intermediate value in order to use a max of the available height, meaning if the value 65% gives away some 1 or 2 cm in height, you have to set it to 65 or 67%, perhaps, in order to make it "screen height" (and have the biggest possible characters in this "one page one screen" view), so there is a lot of fiddling around here.

In photo viewers, this would be totally unacceptable; of course they almost all have a setting "automaticalle resize to window height", but which seems to be blatantly absent from Adobe viewer.

Hence my question if and which alternative viewers do this better; surprisingly, there has been a lot of discussions of additional features of alternative viewers, meaning "what do they do else, besides and above just displaying", but there has never been any discussion, of my knowlege, with regards to the CORE features of a viewer, meaning the quality of display, both in visual quality and in ease of use, and of course in speed of display and speed of search.

Some people withholding their specific knowledge here? ;-)

[Tinman57]

  Adobe has always had too many problems, especially security problems.  I've experimented with several .pdf readers and the one that I took a liking to was PdfXchangeViewer.  Lots of bells and whistles, opens in a flash either in your browser or as an external viewer as I have mine set.

http://www.tracker-software.com/product/downloads/

[tomos]

I've experimented with several .pdf readers and the one that I took a liking to was PdfXchangeViewer.  Lots of bells and whistles, opens in a flash either in your browser or as an external viewer as I have mine set.

http://www.tracker-software.com/product/downloads/

there is a portable version there too
It used have almost no keyboard shortcuts but has improved a lot that way. I last used version 2.5 - it's at over 3 now.
Should be easy enough to test...

[Stoic Joker]

  Adobe has always had too many problems, especially security problems.  I've experimented with several .pdf readers and the one that I took a liking to was PdfXchangeViewer.  Lots of bells and whistles, opens in a flash either in your browser or as an external viewer as I have mine set.

http://www.tracker-software.com/product/downloads/

I've switched several clients over to PDF-XChange Viewer because Adobe's Acrobat/Reader kept crashing their practice management software (AmazingCharts). It's smaller, faster, and a hell of a lot more stable. Only down side is you have to watch their installer due to the bundled (opt-out) "funware".

[tomos]

This is kind of off-topic but vaguely related so I'll post anyway:

I rediscovered this AHK script by dc member Nod5 - it's aimed at if you use one Reader for viewing and a different one for editing. Hotkey opens current file in the other Reader. I often use it simply to open two instances of the same file and look at different pages.

This version is for Adobe Reader/ PDF-Xchange:
within Adobe Reader, pressing F12 will open current file in PDF-xchange Reader

Code: (autohotkey)

; ==================================
; ChangePDFreader.AHK
; with PDF open in Adobe Reader, it opens it in PDF-Xchange viewer via F12
; with many thanks to Nod5 - donationcoder.com
; ==================================
;
#IfWinActive, ahk_class AcrobatSDIWindow
F12::
send ^d  ;open file properties
winwaitactive, Document Properties
ControlGetText, xname, Static2, Document Properties
ControlGetText, xpath, Static18, Document Properties
send {esc}
ifexist %xpath%%xname%
 run C:\[!!!CORRECT PATH HERE!!!]\PDFXchange\PDFXCview.exe "%xpath%%xname%"
return
#IfWinActive
;
; ==================================

it works in Adobe Reader X (dunno about XI)
source (dc)