It's license renewal time and we're trying to cut back. It's not going well.
Reader would work for like 90% of people, but no, everyone needs Standard or Pro because reasons.
This reminds me of my all time favourite lost redditor that asked for a Adobe Acrobat alternative on r/freeuse (which is not about free software but very nsfw). They were extremely helpful though.
That's hilarious.
There was apparently a significant population of German car mechanics on /r/BBW as well.
lost redditors was great fun, I remember that /r/Burial (about the musical artist) used to keep a running count of confused morticians that would wander in.
Conversely, IT is arguing about a $90 license on an employee that costs 80k. If it saves them 2 hours of productivity over the course of the year, it's an even trade, wouldn't you say?
Yeah but those $90 savings make IT management look good, and that 80k/year doesn't come out of IT's budget. Also the productivity loss can't objectively be measured or will just be blamed on the employee.
Pisses me off no end when companies cheap out on IT equipment. I work in a place where a large number of us will be on £35 - £55k, yet the IT budget for each of us is less than 1% of our salary over 3 years.
It's crazy. Don't employ professionals then give them low end enthusiast gear.
I blame accounting. Although I also think that Acrobat's price is BS.
If it was us, we wouldn't have to be fighting for the licenses either.
It's usually some high level IT exec who thinks they'll get a bonus if they shave off $5K in expenses.
It took me months to get them to allow it even though I need it. And in the end, they gave me Creative Suite for some reason.
I worked for a small multinational (20.000ish employees).
The licensing department saved about 3 mio USD/year when they started going at license pinching.
Yeah, this penny pinching on licenses is pretty absurd. I promise you that it hardly affects the bottom line.
$90? Where can I get Adobe Acrobat for $90? Standard is 14.99 per month! I'd buy that shit all day if it was a one time fee of $90.
It'd probably $90/year, not a one-time fee. Which is still a lot better than monthly, but probably only available to businesses/bulk licence buyers
The basic pdf editing options you can find in most browsers (including edge) is more than enough for most people
If you have a mac.. well, preview is bloody amazing
Preview > Acrobat Reader. It's not even a contest.
Imo its not that hard to beat acrobat reader, i hate it!
Preview basically opening most of what you throw at it, with editing options for many is soooo good
Wait… I can edit in Preview?
The best pdf reader for me is Okular. It is free, open source and certified with the German "Blauer Engel" for it's energy efficiency (as first software ever btw)
Blauer Engel
I don't think it's more "power efficient" than other pdf readers (Like Sumatra). It looks like the only reason it got that award is because it's German software. I'm saying that as Austrian. Super weird thing to give an award to.
How would they even measure it? Pdf readers use close to zero CPU. And using more or less RAM has nothing to do with power usage.
I would bet a million that Adobe is very resource heavy in comparison to Okular. So while it is using almost nothing, everything adds up
Pdf readers use close to zero CPU
You say this but devs are making webpages that max out cpu usage when nothing is actually happening to render the webpage, it's just rerendering stuff unnecessarily because hardware is cheap and no one is calling them on it.
Why would any software be different? It's super easy to write shitty software, and there ought to be incentives to write it even better than "normal", which is exactly what this award sounds like.
Yes and no, the people making Okular likely applied because they are German, they got the award because they applied for it, and met the Award criteria. The award criteria seems to me fairly general in its approach to software testing, but resonably rigorous as well, the amount and type of measurements required also seem resonably useful for answering roughly the question: "Is the tested software energy and resource efficient", it can be found here
Presumably it means it has been actually audited by a third party for wasteful cycles, etc. It doesn't necessarily mean that it's cheaper to run than another app, just that it's cheaper than some objective standard.
Not advocating for the use of that software, but…very easy to measure.
Evince for me. I can print off pages from songbooks I have in e-book form. Evince don't care about no drm
Okular is awesome
I'm loving Librera these days. Full version is free on F-Droid.
"Hate" is a strong word for my feelings towards Adobe Acrobat reader. But I really don't like it when I start it to view a pdf, you know the thing it is designed to do, and I have a weird popup, then a toolbar on the right with tools I can't use cause they're premium and a toolbar on the left and a toolbar at the top underneath the standard windows toolbar. I just wanna view the pdf man (also weird snapping when you scroll over a page). Haven't found anything nice yet that just works. I don't want to use Edge or a browser to view them and mupdf is too light weight. Would really like an evince for windows
Try pdf xchange
There's also SumatraPDF which seems pretty similar to Evince, though I don't know the latter
I'll second SumatraPDF. Lightweight, easy.
Try Sumatra, PDF24 and or Foxit Reader. There are plenty of alternatives for a pdf reader, and a lot of them are even faster than acrobat!
Okular is quite nice and I believe has a windows port (though I've not tried it). https://okular.kde.org/download/
Wondershare PDFelement is pretty respectable.
It's annoying AF. But there is an option in the settings to open as it was last closed. So open a file, minimize all those toolbars, save the file, close the file, open a file. Should be good to go.
"Go to Edit > Preferences > Documents, and then select Remember current state of Tools pane."
Yeah, you could of course use Firefox or another cheap or free option. Regardless, it all boils down to people don’t like change. The cost of adobe is very high and staff doesn’t realize or care. Quantify the bottom line to superiors and get muscle behind your change order.
Please don't give Adobe money.
They're not Oracle. But they're trying.
You can view and edit in Firefox, use that and I bet the number of people who don’t need acrobat would jump to 99%
May I recommend SumatraPDF? It's so fast at loading and rendering the document
It's not a PDF editor though. I love Sumatra to death and will attest it loaded my 1000+ page college textbook in an instant. Also auto divided the chapters and subsections into their own table of contents and I could Ctrl+F the entire textbook in seconds.
Unfortunately it still can't sign and edit PDFs.
Big fan of Sumatra.
It's nice for comic books too.
+1 for free and open source software, this program just works
LibreOffice Draw does nice editing as well, I've just learned that recently
And PDF Arranger is very simple for rearranging, rotating, inserting, removing and rotating pages
It makes me sad but Adobe is the only game in town for powerful PDF editing. It's a shame no open source project seems to be there.
It's not open source but I think foxit is even more powerful if we are only talking about pdf editing.
I see people confuse 'annotate' and 'edit' a lot. They don't even try.
We do have Reader at work. When I didn’t have to fill in something for a week or two, I always click the wrong thing (edit) first, have to close down the useless popup and then go to the right thing (annotate).
The UI is built to make you think that having the paid version is the only way to write something inside all those forms.
Look, say what you will, but I kinda like using Edge as a pdf reader. Its out-of-the-box PDF markup features really speak to me, I don't know why.
Foxit was good several years ago - no clue about recently
It's just as garbage nonsenseware as Adobe. I installed it recently on my friend's PC and holy shit, whatever happened to that small program. It went to the bin and Sumatra was installed instead.
I saved the last version before they took out the pdf printer. Still not an editor. Used bluebeam for that. Though that was also bought out and being run into the ground.
Is there another program that will let you make form fillable PDFs that you don't have to pay a sub for?
Master PDF Editor. https://code-industry.net/masterpdfeditor/
Not even editing them. You can do that without Acrobat. It is very helpful if you are designing forms though.
Preferably don't even use Reader, but something else like Sumatra. Suddenly you won't even need to upgrade the hardware.
Most people can manage with the embedded PDF reader from their OS or the web browser nowadays.
Yes but everything is stuffed with telemetry, and web browsers are bloated behemoths. So on Windows at least something lightweight like Sumatra rules.
One of my favorite image viewing and correcting softwares is Irfanview. It's not a full blown editor, but it does everything else you could imagine, extremely lightweight and it very very fast! Oh yeah, it's also free.
I've been using this software for many years, and only recently found out you can open PDFs with it. It absolutely blew me away how quickly it did this as well compared to Adobe!
I just renewed my work creative suit license, normally I just blindly click it but this time I checked other plans and there was a “special offer” for the full suit. I saved my company 300 dollars… no one cared. I’m still feeling good about it though.
Just make sure the package you got the special offer on won't be twice the money next year.
I honestly don't know why anyone uses Adobe acrobat for anything - reader or the editor. PDF is an open standard.
Plenty of open source software does a decent job of making PDFs - Libre Office for example. And if you have Microsoft Word then you can export documents to PDF without issue; or you can use Print to PDF tools too
Its unlikely any office environment doesnt already have licenses for Microsoft Office so just bin Acrobat and direct people to use office. And if you're not paying for office then why are you paying for Acrobat?
As an editor, much of my job--in fact, most of my job--involves reviewing PDFs with Acrobat Pro and marking them up with the markup tools.
I needed to create bookmarks for a large PDF and I could NOT find anyone else who would let me do what I needed.
We already use creative cloud at work and occasionally I need to sign documents, Acrobat makes that pretty easy.
What is a good alternative for saving fillable form PDFs as a flat file or image? I've been using openoffice libreoffice draw for editing PDFs recently but every method I have come across seems like a workaround rather than a feature, while adobe can do it with a click.
just print the form to PDF?
In windows it wont maintain the form size. It will just put it on one of a few preset sizes of paper.
The only thing I use acrobat for is for converting pdf’s to other formats. Why reader can’t do that I don’t know.
Gotta make money somehow?
Even if you did edit them, there are better tools than Acrobat.
What would motivate someone to insist on having software he doesn't use?
Most regular users know where the buttons they need for there job are, that's it.
You dare give them a different layout of the same buttons, and they will swear up and down the buttons are not there or don't work.
Chrome PDF viewer insists it now Windows default? Clearly that means the one they regularly use has gotten taken over by a virus, and they can't find "the button" to do "the thing" that they need to do to these PDFs every week.
It's also a kind of ego thing for some people, if they know a coworker has something then they want it too. Especially if it was expensive. When Parallels came out for MacOS it became fashionable at my work to have a full Windows setup on employer-issued Macs and everyone started demanding it. When they eventually looked at usage it turned out all those people demanding it never actually did anything with it.
You dare give them a different layout of the same buttons, and they will swear up and down the buttons are not there or don't work.
Me cursing silently because there's another unnecessary UI change that hides some things in more sub-menus or changes icons for no apparent reason, now trying to find ways to customize my experience instead of doing any actual work
I actually used to use DC a lot in my previous job (everyone had access), and having full edit functionality would help me in this one too. I've tried other options but I haven't requested a licence because the main thing I do nowadays is merge and split pdfs and there are other options for that. I only miss it occasionally.
I'm a professional, I use professional apps. I don't make the rules!
Time to install
Linux!! 🎉
@TheWaterGod
The only time I ever use acrobat is when I need to fill in the blanks of a PDF. Mainly because Preview.app on macOS does a terrible job of that
Adobe CS is a rip off. It's bloated like fuck.
PDFSaM (Split and Merge) is a tool I gave staff when they were complaining about editing pdfs. Covers most of the jobs the problem staff want. it also wants to install shit alongside itself. So repackage the installer
🏴☠️?
Pirate pdf software when better alternatives are free? Fuck that
And pirating for personal use? Okay
Pirating in a business? Bold move, Cotton
It's upsetting that you have to sell licenses? Granted adobe portal sucks to high hell but I'd rather sell someone crap they don't need because they demanded it rather then not sell anything.
That’s not what he’s saying.
They’re buying for their company