For better or worse, the years I spent working on Preview for Apple (and PDFKit) I felt bad that our (Apple's) PDF implementation was far short of Adobe's.
Radars would show up with PDFs attached, "Preview Does Not Display 3D Image in PDF Like Acrobat" or similar. And I would feel so ... inadequate.
PDFKit could render and capture basic annotations ... and that was about it. We could show you forms, allow editing, but if the PDF had Javascript that would add two fields and put the sum in a third field I had to shrug and say, "Oh well." The effort of hoisting a JavaScript interpreter/runtime was beyond my skillset anyway.
But then I kind of came to see our subset of PDF support as a kind of feature. It's true, we left out the kitchen sink. Adobe was/is clearly interested in putting everything into PDF.
And I mean, as pointed out here, at least you could open a PDF in Preview and not worry about any Javascript executing. ;-)
If it makes you feel any better, Preview is by far the best PDF viewer and editor (I use it for signatures and adding text) I've ever used. I like that the PDF previews in Finder are instant and accurate. I like that it shows as much PDF and as little UI/menubar as possible. I like that it never asks me to upgrade or log in. The search tools work well. I can stitch PDFs together (if I google how to, always forget) and pull certain pages out as their own files.
For all of the PDFs I've ever encountered, Preview has been sufficient and capable. Thank you for your hard work!
I thought Acrobat had ugly UI — stacks and stacks of toolbars for example (this, BTW, about a decade ago — I haven't launched Reader in some time so can't speak to the current UI).
I met one of the engineers from Adobe and said as much — as politely as I could. He said, yeah, we're modeling our UI on Office.
I saw in an instant that they wanted to be seen as a peer, a co-tool, to the Microsoft suite and it all made sense to me.
Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU for not having put all that cruft in, and by Apple's sheer size, effectively discouraging many from producing and circulating those abominations.
Adobe has an awful track record of security (how many exploits in the past 25 years were in Acrobat (not the PDF spec, the actual Acrobat software) and in Flash?) but PDF is an amazing gift to the world, and, thanks to people like you, effectively safer than how Adobe designed it :))
Unfortunately I have the full Acrobat on my work computer, mandated by my employer, sigh, but that's another story.
Radars would show up with PDFs attached, "Preview Does Not Display 3D Image in PDF Like Acrobat" or similar. And I would feel so ... inadequate.
PDFKit could render and capture basic annotations ... and that was about it. We could show you forms, allow editing, but if the PDF had Javascript that would add two fields and put the sum in a third field I had to shrug and say, "Oh well." The effort of hoisting a JavaScript interpreter/runtime was beyond my skillset anyway.
But then I kind of came to see our subset of PDF support as a kind of feature. It's true, we left out the kitchen sink. Adobe was/is clearly interested in putting everything into PDF.
And I mean, as pointed out here, at least you could open a PDF in Preview and not worry about any Javascript executing. ;-)