Adobe acrobat is THE PDF editor. PDF is a proprietary format created and developed by Adobe. Any software that can edit PDFs is doing so in a format they do not have any control over. And there just aren’t any proper PDF editors that are feature complete. now if you’re an individual who needs to make a PDF in the privacy of your own home, by all means, use a cheap or free or FOSS application to do so. But if you need that PDF to be readable and useable and seamlessly compatible on other computers for other users for ever? Better pay the Adobe tax because there is a good chance, it won’t look the way you expect it to when someone opens it up in Adobe which their company definitely has.
I’m not sure this true - PDF is an open standard. The issue isn’t generally with layout and reproducibility - a good PDF maker and a good reader will give you an accurate representation of how it looks on all devices once the PDF is created.
Certainly there isn’t a dedicated FOSS tool for make PDFs; Libre Office and Inkscape do a decent job but not perfect which may be what you’re referring to. And they’re not dedicated PDF makers plus the real problem is building fillable forms and signature tools.
But there is a proprietary alternative called Master PDF that is a dedicated and supports all the PDF standard features I believe; one perpetual license is $80 compared to Adobe subscription based charging. I’m not aware of other options myself but they may exist. But it’s a viable alternative to the “adobe tax”.
Also of course if you have Office 365 from Microsoft, you can use Word to export docs to PDF reliably (in my experience). Obviously as far as you can get from FOSS, but it is an option on Linux via web browser if you have it from work for example; at least you don’t have to pay Adobe but it’s scraping the bottom of the barrel for this threat I know!
There are a few other PDF editors that are cheaper, but they don’t have the same features. PDF seems like something that has outlived its purpose. There has to be other document formats that provide a similar or better experience and prevents alteration.
should be? yes. could be? if one of the big corpo’s with money decides to spend it, yes. But don’t assume ‘there has to be one’, it’s not like file formats suddenly appear like a rare insect or something.
Building off of this, the PDF standard supports all sorts of craziness. It can have embedded math and logic similar to excel files, to the point there’s templates available for banks which will automatically calculate entire loans (including weird ones like balloon mortgages and variable interest rate stuff) without leaving Adobe Reader, and the recent Doom PDF and Linux PDF projects exploit the fact that pdfs support embedded javascript.
There’s also an actual market for enterprise PDF templates like the banking ones I described with automatic calculations and whatnot. So some people literally make their living selling PDFs to businesses that businesses actually use
I don’t know how it stacks up price-wise, but I’d argue Bluebeam is a far superior PDF editing program. It even covers some word processing, Illustrator, and some PowerPoint adjacent things.
That being said, I can’t see it as practical for the average consumer.
not true. dont oay adobe so more pdfs will look like the user intended. dont fall adobe scams like weird functions that should be in a pdf anyways. pdfs created with masterpdfeditor look exactly as intended. so, again: no, adobe is a scam. always has been.
Funny, it’s been less than 24hrs and I got a ticket in complaining about why PDFs look one way in Ease US PDF editor and totally different in Adobe Reader. You’re just wrong. I didn’t say it was worth the money to pay for Adobe, and I didn’t say it wasn’t a scam. But I do tell the truth when it comes to true parity, there are competitors to PDF editing but there is no free PDF editors that properly do the job 100% of the time.
i do not know what “ease US PDF editor” is and dont care. there are plenty of broken editors.
i am saying you are wrong to think only adobe scamware can create pdfs that look as intended in the reader.
Adobe acrobat is THE PDF editor. PDF is a proprietary format created and developed by Adobe. Any software that can edit PDFs is doing so in a format they do not have any control over. And there just aren’t any proper PDF editors that are feature complete. now if you’re an individual who needs to make a PDF in the privacy of your own home, by all means, use a cheap or free or FOSS application to do so. But if you need that PDF to be readable and useable and seamlessly compatible on other computers for other users for ever? Better pay the Adobe tax because there is a good chance, it won’t look the way you expect it to when someone opens it up in Adobe which their company definitely has.
I’m not sure this true - PDF is an open standard. The issue isn’t generally with layout and reproducibility - a good PDF maker and a good reader will give you an accurate representation of how it looks on all devices once the PDF is created.
Certainly there isn’t a dedicated FOSS tool for make PDFs; Libre Office and Inkscape do a decent job but not perfect which may be what you’re referring to. And they’re not dedicated PDF makers plus the real problem is building fillable forms and signature tools.
But there is a proprietary alternative called Master PDF that is a dedicated and supports all the PDF standard features I believe; one perpetual license is $80 compared to Adobe subscription based charging. I’m not aware of other options myself but they may exist. But it’s a viable alternative to the “adobe tax”.
Also of course if you have Office 365 from Microsoft, you can use Word to export docs to PDF reliably (in my experience). Obviously as far as you can get from FOSS, but it is an option on Linux via web browser if you have it from work for example; at least you don’t have to pay Adobe but it’s scraping the bottom of the barrel for this threat I know!
There are a few other PDF editors that are cheaper, but they don’t have the same features. PDF seems like something that has outlived its purpose. There has to be other document formats that provide a similar or better experience and prevents alteration.
PowerPDF or Kofax or whatever it’s called now was very close to parity if not exceed functionality for most office jobs.
Yes, this is my company’s preferred solution.
should be? yes. could be? if one of the big corpo’s with money decides to spend it, yes. But don’t assume ‘there has to be one’, it’s not like file formats suddenly appear like a rare insect or something.
Any document format could prevent alteration with the addition of a digital signature.
Building off of this, the PDF standard supports all sorts of craziness. It can have embedded math and logic similar to excel files, to the point there’s templates available for banks which will automatically calculate entire loans (including weird ones like balloon mortgages and variable interest rate stuff) without leaving Adobe Reader, and the recent Doom PDF and Linux PDF projects exploit the fact that pdfs support embedded javascript.
There’s also an actual market for enterprise PDF templates like the banking ones I described with automatic calculations and whatnot. So some people literally make their living selling PDFs to businesses that businesses actually use
That sounds like a problem between them and Adobe tbh
I don’t know how it stacks up price-wise, but I’d argue Bluebeam is a far superior PDF editing program. It even covers some word processing, Illustrator, and some PowerPoint adjacent things.
That being said, I can’t see it as practical for the average consumer.
How does Sumatra fall into all of this? It’s an open source version
not true. dont oay adobe so more pdfs will look like the user intended. dont fall adobe scams like weird functions that should be in a pdf anyways. pdfs created with masterpdfeditor look exactly as intended. so, again: no, adobe is a scam. always has been.
Funny, it’s been less than 24hrs and I got a ticket in complaining about why PDFs look one way in Ease US PDF editor and totally different in Adobe Reader. You’re just wrong. I didn’t say it was worth the money to pay for Adobe, and I didn’t say it wasn’t a scam. But I do tell the truth when it comes to true parity, there are competitors to PDF editing but there is no free PDF editors that properly do the job 100% of the time.
i do not know what “ease US PDF editor” is and dont care. there are plenty of broken editors. i am saying you are wrong to think only adobe scamware can create pdfs that look as intended in the reader.