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My partner's just shouted me. "Can you help? I've got this free trial and..." and I'm thinking "oh good christ, what now" before I've even seen what she's done.
Turns out she's got a trial of full Acrobat. Which is running online as a web plugin to (non-default browser except when MS wants it to be) Edge. Which is every bit as Lovecraftian as it sounds.
So, I'm open to recommendations for Acrobat replacements which a) aren't hot garbage, b) actually have an app, c) are free and d) don't involve me trawling through pages of "BEST ACROBAT REPLACEMENTS 2025, NUMBER 7 WILL SHOCK YOU!!1!" articles which are thinly disguised adverts.
(Acrobat Reader is getting more obtuse with every release in and of itself. Hey, who remembers File / Save As? Halcyon days.)
How about Acrobat Pro 😉
Yeah I know not funny.
But use it for work, editing & saving PDFs etc.
Ah but don't suppose you want to pay £20 a month, nah me neither.
Sorry completely useless post.
Maybe not exactly what you want but I am enjoying how easy PDF24 is to use. Does what it says it will do with no annoying adverts.
Can Edge/Chrome itself not act as a pdf reader without installing anything else or do you want a separate app?
For filling or signing PDF forms, FoxIt reader is ok (but the equivalent of acrobat with full editing is expensive). For annotating PDFs I often use Skim as it’s more capable and more robust than Preview on a Mac.
Does it need to run Flash?
For filling or signing PDF forms, FoxIt reader is ok (but the equivalent of acrobat with full editing is expensive). For annotating PDFs I often use Skim as it’s more capable and more robust than Preview on a Mac.
I use foxit (free version) on PC or just view PDFs in a browser, but it really depends on how much functionality you want.. I mean, you can view PDFs in any web browser...
The 'Adobe ecosystem' is a hot mess, agreed - if you really need it, just pirate an older version.
Libre Office. Does that not edit PDF's etc. Most certainly saves as PDF. Inkscape and GIMP both do as. Depends on what you want to do 🙂
Can Edge/Chrome itself not act as a pdf reader without installing anything else
a) Yes, it's shit and one of the first things I disable on a new build because it never works properly.
b) As I said, she's got herself a free trial of full Acrobat - ie, yes, Acrobat Pro - because she wants to use it to edit .PDF files.
c) She's a technophobe. She takes to new tech (or indeed, old tech) like a duck to petrol. She's saved her work to her "documents" (ie, Adobe's self-imposed cloud solution which will no doubt be a barrel o' yuks when the trial runs out) and has emailed the documents to herself as a backup (which is a share link to said cloud file). Today she asked me to help and then sat next to me telling me I was doing it wrong whilst I tried to unpick whatever the **** she'd done to a document which she had open at least three times in different places plus the original template, then had a tantrum when I suggested copying it to her documents folder because folders are complicated and she'll never find it again.
d) Her laptop is dogshit. I'm getting her a new one for her birthday (in like six weeks) but literally every time she touches anything it goes wrong and it's always either the laptop's fault or my fault for not replacing it.
Libre Office. Does that not edit PDF's etc.
Does it?
Gods help me if she has to learn an entirely new office suite which is almost but not quite the same as the one she has now.
As I said, she's got herself a free trial of full Acrobat - ie, yes, Acrobat Pro - because she wants to use it to edit .PDF files.
Ah, I didn't see that she needed to be able to edit. I thought she had just downloaded the full thing because Adobe try and trick you into it. I was another Foxit user in the past but its not free if you need to edit
Can't help re. Acrobat but I am in a similar position wrt technical support of other half. You have my sympathy.
They're sneaker ****ers aren't they? I just searched for free pdf editing, and lo and behold, adobe search result proclaims they have a free pdf editor that lets you easily edit pdfs for free. Turns out to be a free trial of a paid-for product though.
Anyone any idea why someone like Google and Microsoft are not releasing office products which are better at PDF handling and editing?
I know you can open PDF in Word or PDF Viewer, but they both seem 'weak' at it.
Anyone any idea why someone like Google and Microsoft are not releasing office products which are better at PDF handling and editing?
I know you can open PDF in Word or PDF Viewer, but they both seem 'weak' at it.
Purely speculating but,
How many people start "what computer?" threads on here stating a requirement of light Microsoft Office use? In the 15 years I've been on STW I don't think I've ever seen anyone specify "must be able to run Acrobat." MS Office being able to handle .PDF docs just well enough that people don't see a need to buy Acrobat Pro but not so well that customers decide to jump ship completely to a 'better' format is perhaps a desirable market position for Microsoft.
Any Adobe products should be buried at the crossroads with a yew wood stake hammered through its shrivelled, malignant little heart!
Anything graphics related, that relies on a subscription model, and a requirement to save files into its own cloud storage, is inherently toxic, especially Adobe, because once they have those files, they make it almost impossible to retrieve them to store somewhere else.
I guess the obvious answer is to set things up so a duplicate file is automatically saved to offline storage.
and a requirement to save files into its own cloud storage, is inherently toxic, especially Adobe, because once they have those files, they make it almost
There is no requirement to save files to Adobe cloud. None of my Adobe files are saved there - my files are on my computers, in Dropbox and on external hard drives.
And in their defence - I've tried the alternatives (Affinity Suite) and even though they are good, they're missing many finer features.
Also - as a professional if you can't afford £60/month for 'tools' then you haven't got much of a business. (£48/month ex. VAT for full Suite).
I've not found a good alternative to Acrobat if you want to majorly edit PDFs. PDF is an Adobe invention after all so why should they give tech away for free.
There is no requirement to save files to Adobe cloud.
Perhaps, but "requirement" is doing some heavy lifting here. It may not be strictly required but it's a pain in the bollocks if you don't want to. "Files / Your Documents" is Adobe's cloud storage and is the default document location (on Acrobat Reader on my PC it then starts mithering for a Creative Cloud login). Your actual computer is listed under "other."
Also - as a professional if you can't afford £60/month for 'tools' then you haven't got much of a business. (£48/month ex. VAT for full Suite).
She's a professional WFH childminder. Her business is doing just fine without needing to spend £60/month in order to spend an afternoon once a year changing "2024" to "2025" on half a dozen policy documents, though I'm sure she'll appreciate your misgivings.
The real embuggerance with all of this is that the stupid app she has to use to upload her policies won't accept anything other than .PDFs. The source documents are in Word format but rather than open those her starting point this weekend was last year's converted PDFs which then prompted her with a free trial offer and we were a day's work down and well into huffy-puffy hand-flappy mode by the time she thought to ask me what the **** was going on trying to delete a block of text in some weird-ass layers view, followed by a narrative of "oh my god you've lost everything!!" every time I alt-tabbed to a different window.
TL;DR: She's the sort of person who types a capital letter by pressing Caps Lock twice, Acrobat Pro is not the solution here (and I can think of a better use for £700/year).
Perhaps, but "requirement" is doing some heavy lifting here. It may not be strictly required but it's a pain in the bollocks if you don't want to.
Sorry - but it really isn't.
I use it everyday - InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, Acrobat.
File > Save > Select location.
Just like saving any other file.
She's a professional WFH childminder. Her business is doing just fine without needing to spend £60/month in order to spend an afternoon once a year changing "2024" to "2025" on half a dozen policy documents, though I'm sure she'll appreciate your misgivings.
You know I was talking regarding professional graphics environment.
Anyway - even editing in Acrobat is a pain-in-the-ass most of the time - it's clunky and slow. But if it's just a few dates that need amending send it to me and I'll sort it for you.
but it really isn't.
Perhaps because you use it every day.
File > Save > Select location.
Just like saving any other file.
Not on mine it isn't.
You know I was talking regarding professional graphics environment.
Sure. Point was, that's not the environment we're dealing with here.
even editing in Acrobat is a pain-in-the-ass most of the time - it's clunky and slow. But if it's just a few dates that need amending send it to me and I'll sort it for you.
Be careful what you wish for. 😁 I genuinely appreciate the offer but honestly it's likely more trouble than it's worth (and not just for you). I'll have a proper look at it when she's not busy. The document I saw had what looked like orphaned highlighting all over the place which had had the text removed, it was a right tip.
If the source docs are ms word, then why isn’t she editing those then printing to pdf? Sounds like you want an alternative to a product she doesn’t need, and also at the same time don’t want to put up with her having to learn a new product? Just use word!
If the source docs are ms word, then why isn’t she editing those then printing to pdf?
I assume Technophobia? But yes, that seems the obvious fix - I have "MS print to pdf" which I'd assumed was part of Windows or Office, and works well enough, except that it won't print an updated version to the same filename (which might be a feature).
I have "MS print to pdf" which I'd assumed was part of Windows or Office
In Word (or Excel), use "Save as" (Control + Shift +S) to save as a PDF. It will prompt you for a filename. You can save it with the same filename (and overwrite older versions of the PDF), or give it a new name.
File/Save As allows you select what file type want, including PDF. Well my version of Office does anyway.
If the source docs are ms word, then why isn’t she editing those then printing to pdf?
I believe I've already explained the reason why. She's a technical scatterbrain with zero patience working on a laptop which I despise to the core of my being.
"Save as PDF" from Word is what we - well, mostly I - have done for like the last three years. This year she has, I assume, opened a previous PDF directly and it's gone "do you want a free trial?" Then she's a day's work down by the time she's said anything to me about it. It's not so much polishing a turd as trying to get the original turd back inside the dog.
... And yes, I know how Word works, thanks. That's not what I was asking about.
Aside from this particular bear trap born of her own machinations there are also (vanishingly rare) occasions where I've wanted to make minor edits to existing PDFs myself, so a solution which isn't going to cost £60/month or piss about with formatting even more badly than my partner does innately would be very much appreciated.
I'm quite happy saving out Word docs as PDF; opening pre-existing PDFs in Word on the other hand, not so much.
This year she has, I assume, opened a previous PDF directly and it's gone "do you want a free trial?" Then she's a day's work down by the time she's said anything to me about it. It's not so much polishing a turd as trying to get the original turd back inside the dog.
From experience she'll have to bite the bullet and start again and re-do whatever work she did in Acrobat back in the original Word file. You can select text and copy/paste out of PDF files so hopefully not too hard.
Otherwise next year you'll be faced with editing this years PDF file again. You may as well go back a step now.
PDF files are great for their intended use (and are the de-facto standard in the print-trade), but they are a bar-steward to edit even within the Adobe infrastructure. And PDF files created by Word aren't as clean/well rendered as files created from InDesign or Illustrator so even harder to edit. Paragraphs get split, lines of text get split - even words get split into individual letters!
Sorry Cougar but I’d avoid Acrobat Pro (cost) and all the other PDF wranglers (function) and go the edit in Word and save as PDF route. Painful, but better.
Then I’d write a working instruction covering the process for policy updates.
"Save as PDF" from Word is what we - well, mostly I
There's your error as @Greybeard alluded to. Print to is a different beast in Word (on Macs it's the only way to password protect a pdf output from Word and doesn't screw over spacing too much in the pdf). It's not optimal but type-setting/designing in Word and then printing the output to a new file and keeping the Word doc will make the changes next year much easier.
So long as there's no nested columns/tables needed in the Word docx, you're golden. If you need to design something more complciated then Serif's Designer app at £50 is your best bet.
One no-cost option you could try is to import the pdf into Inkscape. This will create a new page (presumably A4 in this case) with all the key graphics and text ungrouped and therefore free to change/edit. You can then save as svg and/or export back to pdf. I sometimes use this route for creating figures when publishing papers, but there’s a bit of a learning curve to get familiar with the software.
The plot thickens.
I can't get near the thing to spend any actual time trying to unpick what chaos she's wrought because she's "too busy," then I had to deal with a full-on tantrum last night. As far as I can tell she's opened a PDF file which she'd emailed to herself as an email attachment (because Reasons), spent all evening working on it before hitting Save. It "said something about fonts" and then the entire document turned into [?] symbols. Best guess is it's shit itself because as an open email attachment it never really existed outside of a temp file.
I spent most of the night learning more than I ever cared to about Adobe's approach to embedded fonts (it's using Arial and Calibri so hardly anything exotic) whilst ultimately failing to recover the document. It's as though it's not just lost the font (it claims 'embedded subset' in document properties) but actually converted letters it can't render into nonsense, any variation of exporting or printing makes no difference. I merged it with the original even cos the fonts have to be present then, right? Wrong.
So I've sacked it off and gone back to the original email, saved the document to OneDrive and converted it to a Word document so that when she inevitably finds some way of ****ing this up before blaming everything from "this bloody computer" to the cats to the war in Ukraine, I stand a fighting chance of recovering it.
Oh, and for added LOLs Acrobat seems to have lost any notion that Creative Cloud exists. The only File options are "this computer" and "attach storage" (DropBox, OneDrive et al, no CC option) under "other." I had to go through the web app to get at the existing files and then there's no sensible way of file manipulation. I had to download each one manually, one by one because as soon as you tick more than one ☑ selection box the Download option disappears.
People pay £60/month for this garbage? The trial runs out I think on Sunday and is set to autorenew because of course it is. I pointed this out to her and suggested she cancelled and was met with "I don't know how to do that." I'd bet with cast-iron certainty that the moment I pick it up she'll be shoulder-surfing telling me what to click on.
Incidentally,
The root cause of all this shit is that as I said above, the app she has to use to up/download documentation requires .PDF files. I thought she was just being random for a change but no, if you go to the Upload screen it expects a .PDF and there's no way of changing it. Quite everyone else who works under the same umbrella does I have no idea, but I'm reasonably confident that the preferred methodology when caring for 3-year olds isn't Acrobat Pro.
People pay £60/month for this garbage?
Acrobat Pro on it's own is £19.97! 😜
(it's using Arial and Calibri so hardly anything exotic)
There are many different versions of the same font from different font foundries - if you've not got the exact version used to create the PDF it will throw a wobbly.
Getting the right font is vital for commercial print as a font defaulting to courier and not being spotted could cost big time on a finished job. There are hard-rules Acrobat sticks by to ensure things display as originally intended.
So I've sacked it off and gone back to the original email, saved the document to OneDrive and converted it to a Word document
As I said above you need to go back to last years original Word file and start again. Once PDFs get screwed up you may as well drop them in the trash.
Quite everyone else who works under the same umbrella does I have no idea, but I'm reasonably confident that the preferred methodology when caring for 3-year olds isn't Acrobat Pro.
Creating PDFs from pretty much any word processor/DTP software is dead easy.
Editing PDFs is the hard bit - PDFs are designed to be a container of information so anyone on any platform can view them knowing that what they see is what the original creator intended.
Acrobat is not where you create documents.
I feel your pain.
I had this a couple of weeks ago and after only just resisting the rage urge to throw everything through the window I found a bodge that worked.
Print the PDF. Scan it and save as a jpeg. Insert the jpeg into a word document, then insert a text box over the bits I needed to edit. When done, save as a PDF for sending and a word document for next year.
There must be easier ways but the red mist was fully in place.
Was fine for me as it was just 4 pages. If it was a 50 page document I don't dare to think how it would have ended.
You know when you laugh at other people's situations, and then feel bad, but only because you know it's bad (too do so) but dont feel bad (to do so) due to familiarity with like experience?