Products · Pattern or everyday thing
PDF viewers
Raised as a usability problem by 23 people on Hacker News over 13 years (2013–2025), in 20 threads.
People raised many different problems with PDF viewers, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 23 complaints
- Scanned PDF pages take multiple seconds to load when jumping to another page2025-08-25
- Looking up a referenced figure on another page breaks the flow of reading2025-03-06
- Switching between several sections of a spec means repeated scrolling and going back, which is tedious2025-01-15
- Interfaces are ugly and inconsistent, making it hard to quickly learn how to do things2024-11-10
- PDF text can't be searched in most viewers because word spaces are missing2024-01-18
- PDF viewers users have don't support the accessibility standards needed2023-12-01
- Text in PDFs can't be copied on mobile2023-02-05
- Can't copy images or select text in most PDF readers2022-06-09
- Text selection picks random characters, and links often don't work or make going back hard2022-06-09
- Can't rotate a PDF and save it rotated without installing another app2021-10-15
- Tiny scrollbar and tedious gesture scrolling make navigating long PDFs frustrating2021-04-05
- PDFs render slowly page by page with screen flashing, slowing the computer2021-04-04
- Zoom resets on page change, so content gets squished to center on phones2021-03-03
- PDF viewer search has poor UI and slow performance2020-12-02
- Scroll handle auto-hides before user can grab it precisely2020-08-27
- PDFs downloaded as files, opening pre-installed shareware viewer on Windows2019-10-21
- Scrolling is jerky and pages can't be shown side by side full screen2019-09-20
- Can't find an option to reflow PDF text on a small screen2019-08-11
- Searching PDFs is more painful than searching plain text2016-08-14
- Reading hundreds of PDFs in rapid succession is near impossible and very slow2013-07-14
- Highlighting a sentence requires many clicks through toolbar menus2013-07-14
- Blank page margins waste screen space, forcing awkward fit-page mode or manual zooming2013-05-06
- Going back and forth between pages is difficult and rendering is too slow2013-02-24