There was a point not so long ago where Adobe Collaboration Sync got so bad on my Windows 10 box it wouldn't let me close any pdfs that were open. "File in use" error, even if all Adobe programs were closed except for that pdf. I'd have to go into Task Manager and manually kill it. Between that and Adobe Updater I couldn't get rid of it by any known means, and it was choking the shit out of my machine.
I'm transitioning to Linux but not there yet, still need the Windows box for now, so I had to do something. But I'm old school, so it was a DOS batch file to the rescue. I call it "kiladobe.bat":
taskkill /f /im armsvc.exe
del "C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Adobe\ARM\1.0\armsvc.exe"
taskkill /f /im AdobeCollabSync.exe
del "C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat DC\Acrobat\AdobeCollabSync.exe"
It's now a scheduled task in taskschd.msc. I put kiladobe.bat in the main Adobe program folder (heh) and run that task as administrator at startup and every four hours or so, give or take an hour.
No more problems.
Now, all that remains is that every so often I see the command window flash up for a split second because this batch file is killing Adobe shit, and it just makes me smile. (I could probably make it stop flashing up the CLI, but I genuinely enjoy the reminder of how I'm fucking Adobe's virus-like install and lock endeavors up the ass.)
EDITED TO ADD a simple "@echo off" by itself as the first line would probably turn off any appearance of the CLI, if anyone wants to use this text for their own batch file. If that didn't work I'd probably throw a space and a ">nul" at the end of each line to grab the output and throw it into neverneverland.
To be honest I do not like PDF readers being bundled in browser's binaries, I see web rendering engines themselfs as a pile of legacy impossible to rewrite spaghetti.
Qutebrowser for example has PDF.js as an optional, installable dependency. I guess Firefox can be recompiled without PDF support, if someone wants to save those... 3MB. But just that my Linux mind has slight aversion to bundling stuff in single binary, because on Linux installing 1 or 100 programs if they are packaged takes the same time.
Ah. And some commands for PDFs are really useful :P.
For example I used convert file.jpg file.pdf to upload couple of documents I had scanned as pictures but website required a PDF extension.
Nice.
The question I have is does tesseract do better OCR on pdfs than chat GPT lol
Also obligatory fuck Adobe.
Damn install a proper pdf viewer and use instead of adobe... Or do you have to edit pdfs?
I have Foxit installed and can usually use that, but am forced to have Adobe Reader installed for other reasons.
Adobe Reader will now never be updated on my machine. It's a small price to pay. And Foxit is great for most pdf tasks.