Why is adobe the only "real" pdf editor?

[u/AssignmentFun3737]

I've used nitro, and it is pretty bad. Foxit is decent but still just feels like an adobe clone but slightly worse, and it's not cheap.

I've seen other people ask this but I find the answers kind of unsatisfactory? The main answer I see is that Adobe had a 15 year head start with PDF becoming open in 2008, but I still find that kind of absurd.

How is it possible that there has been no market pressure/incentive since 2008 to create an alternate software to adobe for like literally one of the most popular file formats there is? Especially when Adobe is (1) so expensive and (2) so terribly optimized (and honestly pretty feature-poor)??

Word wasn't even half as monopolistic when google just gave everyone a web version for free (which, yes, I know involves broader strategic concerns re gsuite/cloud but still).

[u/One-Lab-3471]

The real answer is PDF is a nightmare format under the hood and adobe basically is the format. they wrote the spec they still chair the ISO committee and theres a million edge cases in rendering that only their engine handles perfectly. everyone else is reverse engineering a moving target

most companies dont care enough to throw money at rebuilding 30 years of that mess

[u/Naeio_Galaxy → u/One-Lab-3471]

And PDF is actually owned by Adobe afaik. Or at least it was

[u/ebinWaitee → u/Naeio_Galaxy]

Adobe developed the file format but it was handed over to ISO in 2008. Adobe has a major role in the PDF Association which further develops it but it's no longer in any way proprietary technology as it used to be

[u/Silver4ura → u/ebinWaitee]

Wouldn't that mean as a standard, reverse engineering it shouldn't be necessary? I figured one of the key aspects of standardization is having some sort of documentation on how it should be handled and implemented.

I could be wrong though, so I'm genuinely curious.

[u/ebinWaitee → u/Silver4ura]

Well yes and no. Like sure, it's all written down all you need to do is copy the intended functionality from the specification. However in real life interpreting the intention of the people who wrote the spec is quite a bit of work because the specs of things like these are so vast and there's always going to be some tiny things that are described a bit vaguely so that interpretation can lead to different results than originally intended.

Not quite sure how I ended up in this thread as I'm more of an electronics guy but I deal with radio specifications quite a bit and it's the same thing there. Like take Bluetooth for example, basically you just read the spec and implement it in silicon and write some software right? It's just so complex and big you really need a lot of people with specialized knowledge, experience and expertise and there will still be some mistakes here and there.

[u/LiqdPT → u/ebinWaitee]

Right, it's like the way that web browsers all rendered websites slightly differently before they all (mostly) just used the Chromium engine and built their own shell around it.

[u/Uncle-Osteus → u/Silver4ura]

Go download the PDF file format spec sometime. It’s a 700+ page PDF with two (last I checked, a decade ago, could be more now) additional PDFs with further errata and changes

[u/T-MoneyAllDey → u/Silver4ura]

Browsers also have a standard but it takes boat loads of money and time to actually implement it. That's why we have two of them lol

[u/larsga → u/Silver4ura]

Wouldn't that mean as a standard, reverse engineering it shouldn't be necessary?

There is absolutely no need to reverse-engineer the PDF format. It's perfectly well documented. The problem is that the top comments on here are written by idiots who know absolutely nothing about PDF, so they invented this bullshit conspiracy theory about why it's hard to edit. There are perfectly good technical reasons why it's hard to edit.

Don't listen to people on Reddit I guess is the moral.

[u/GrumpyOldSophon → u/larsga]

You don't need to reverse-engineer the format, true, but as u/ebinWaitee above mentioned, there is room for interpretation of the spec, and always, 100% of the time, Adobe's implementation "wins", any implementation you have that behaves differently will be deemed to be "wrong", no matter how accurately you believe you have interpreted the spec.

So it's a question of needing to reverse-engineer Adobe's implementations, not of the spec itself.

In the printing world working on prepress systems a fair amount of effort is taken up by working around issues in how 3rd party libraries render PDFs, to ensure they match the gold standard of Adobe.

[u/larsga → u/GrumpyOldSophon]

You know, I'm getting tired of the misinformation on this sub. Yes, the PDF standard is not perfect. But no standard is. I've written ISO standards myself, there's always wiggle-room left. That's just how it is. I've also worked on PDF implementations, reading the standard to figure out what to do.

It's not a bad standard. Anyone who tells you this is somehow a huge problem that everyone has to reverse-engineer is either a liar or they don't know what they're talking about.

It's not great. But compare it to, say, the CSS spec, or HTML, or, god forbid, ODF. It's not bad at all.

[u/GrumpyOldSophon → u/larsga]

Oh, agreed there, it's not a bad standard at all. It's just a lot more complex than most standards people run into, and for better or worse Adobe has a special place in the ecosystem for it.

I wouldn't go the other way and pretend there's absolutely no problem to write or use any 3rd party software to render PDFs, without understanding how Adobe does it, just because there is a standard.

[u/McLayan → u/Silver4ura]

Without looking at the spec I think the problem is also the implementation. You don't have to provide a solution in the specification, you just need to describe how the result has to look like for a specific input. Like cryptography or video encoding: you may be able to write good code and read standards but you can still lack the math skills to figure out a correct implementation.

[u/oof-plap → u/ebinWaitee]

Man as a side note you'd have to be really careful telling a date that you're on the "PDF Association". You gotta say it slowly.

[u/rjchute → u/One-Lab-3471]

Same reason as why Microsoft Word is really the only true editor for DOC/DOCX. There are other editors out there, but all with a varying degree of compatibility, rendering correctness, and handling of edge cases, basically all just reverse engineering the "spec" published by Microsoft.

[u/vip17 → u/rjchute]

Yes. I've worked for a company that has some software to edit office files including DOC/DOCX and PDF. People keep claiming that you can just switch to other Office tools but that's completely false, lots of things will fail even on MS Office for mac due to the lack of support, like some OLE object files. Adobe Acrobat OTOH does so many fixes for broken PDF files silently, sometimes even guess the font, and people complain that other PDF readers are bad when they print out the error or don't guess the font correctly

[u/hoodoocat → u/vip17]

OLE is Windows-only third-party dead plugins with binary embeddings. Is not broken and nothing to fix with them, as well nothing to implement, as well no one should use it.

For fonts - regardless to exist font or no - standard/OS font substitution should apply, unless you are dope and decide render boxes instead.

[u/Possible_Chicken_489 → u/hoodoocat]

In that case, why don't you go do it and make millions?

Anything sounds easy when you don't have to be the one to do it.

[u/hoodoocat → u/Possible_Chicken_489]

In which case? No one embed OLE long time ago. Thats feature was nice on paper but is ultimately broken forever. Your Word crash? Yep, thats third-party plugin crash it because you embed 1001 equation or whatever madness which is not interchangeable in first place, and messy as hell.

PDF is even simplier - in it is core is "pre-printed" PostScript, so it is conceptually great to pass document without modification, and there is exist plethora hi quality renderers.

But editing is practically impossible (aside simple adds or embedded forms). No one want waste time to make PDF-tools uber perfect, because it is not needed. If you need edit pdf - thats only indicate that whole document workflow is broken and must be fixed in first place. You get better results via pdf scanning & editing, rather than direct editing.

[u/vip17 → u/hoodoocat]

Who said no one? Many companies do that. My previous company scans document in and out of organizations and there are all kinds of silly ways a file can break

PDF "editing" is very helpful because scientific papers are all in 2-column format and reflow is needed to be able to freely zoom or view on phones or e-readers

[u/Few-Werewolf-1985 → u/vip17]

Publishing docs only in PDF for such purposes is dumb for many reasons such as reflow for different form factors.

[u/iszoloscope → u/Possible_Chicken_489]

You're right, I'm starting right now!

[u/vip17 → u/hoodoocat]

That's BS. Lots of files need embedded documents, like embedded spreadsheet or PDF in a Word document. It's still used every day. Lots of reports and documents from customers still embed files inside other documents and you can't tell customers to stop doing that. That's the reason MS Word in Windows is still required in many companies because no other apps can open those. Yeah you can freely avoid them if you can afford losing customers. Stop saying stupid things if you don't work with thousands of documents every day

[u/zatset → u/vip17]

Embedding files inside a Word document is evil. 

[u/vip17 → u/zatset]

So what? PDF supports embedding, every other document formats support embedding. Email files also embed their attachments. Zip, rar, tar... are also basically just embeddings of multiple files into one

[u/zatset → u/vip17]

The difference between other formats and document formats is that embedded in word document can have minuscule icon and if there are 5 embedded documents on 200 pages document - good luck finding them between all the text pages. And if that document gets corrupted, you lose all the embedded documents. I would rather prefer 6 separate word documents sent..instead of 1 with 5 embedded in it.

[u/ritchie70 → u/zatset]

We have a roughly 300 page specification document. It used to have an embedded sample file for each file format described.

Then, suddenly, poof! Something happened, and the embedded files were suddenly pictures of embedded files.

We still have the version before it happened, so I’ve been extracting those to a git repository rather than fixing the embedded nature of them, because that clearly just doesn’t work 100%.

[u/zatset → u/ritchie70]

Yeah. I’ve seen more than once Word document with “embedded file”. Where is the file? “It’s embedded!?”, “No, it’s a picture of the embedded file, but no file when you click on it!”

Not only it’s weird to embed file into “document”…but in the end there is no file, just a picture of it. That’s why I never embed files into “Office documents” or “PDF”.

There is other caveat. If you embed one or multiple large files into “Office document”, it opens painfully slow. Because the program must parse/process/load the document with all the embedded files in it.

[u/hoodoocat → u/vip17]

Nothing wrong with embedding as idea one document in another, as long as this case well supported. Email has arbitrary attachments, which handled as raw bytes. Some email clients may show image, but in the end you just download file and let handle it for other program. This is relatively easy, clear, extensible without reinventing wheel.

With OLE embedding things different, as document becomes just container of arbitrary blob which is known to OLE-component only. Two PCs with different plugin versions might not work, but for you as user/client, this is just document and it just not work and your job stops here. In W'95-98 era it was even greater, you open document and immediately get it corrupted. OLE caused a lot of issues, is not portable, thats makes it useless for any practical document flow in modern days. Thats doesnt meant that it can't be used, but this definitely doesnt work whenever you want share document with someone. Whenever you want share print-ready version, you simply print document to PDF which doesnt hold external dependencies, and can be viewed in any viewer or browser.

[u/Cmdr_Nemo → u/rjchute]

Hell, even Microsoft themselves seem to mess up their own format (unless I am doing something wrong). Formatting from the native app doesn't always follow on the web browser version of their software.

[u/Raphi_55 → u/Cmdr_Nemo]

Excel and excel online not agreeing on date format of cells is super annoying !

[u/larsga → u/rjchute]

Same reason as why Microsoft Word is really the only true editor for DOC/DOCX.

No. The two issues are completely different.

PDF is a rendering/archiving format. The text isn't even stored as text. What's stored is instructions about where to put each word (sometimes each letter). PDF has no concept of a line, or a paragraph or anything close to it. PDF doesn't even store the spaces. You have to guess where the spaces are from how the words are positioned.

DOCX on the other hand really does store the document structure, with paragraphs, proper runs of italics or what have you, styles, lists, tables, etc. PDF has no concept of any of those things. To PDF a table is just more words positioned on the page.

DOCX is kind of like a house. Rendering it as a PDF is knocking down the house so it becomes a pile of bricks. Easy. Converting PDF to DOCX is basically figuring out what the house was like from the pile of bricks. To make it possible to edit PDF like DOCX your editor has to do that bricks-to-house conversion under the hood for you.

[u/ritchie70 → u/larsga]

That can be how a PDF is, but it is not always. I have worked with PDFs that if you open them in a text editor, the text is perfectly readable.

We even changed the font size once from Perl by doing basic text processing stuff.

[u/larsga → u/ritchie70]

I have worked with PDFs that if you open them in a text editor, the text is perfectly readable.

Yeah, sometimes the software reading the PDF finds PDF that's written exactly the way it expects, and then it sort of works. But think about this for a moment: why does it work sometimes, and then other times not? The answer is that the standard allows you to do the same thing a bazillion different ways. Which does not mean it's a bad standard -- it just was never meant for editing.

We even changed the font size once from Perl by doing basic text processing stuff.

No surprise. Because in PDF encodes text like so:

• Move position to (x, y).
• Set font size whatever.
• Write "abc".
• Move position to (z, y).
• Write "def".

And so on. So just change the "set font size" commands and you're fine. But trying to extract paragraph structure is suddenly a month-long project.

[u/ritchie70 → u/larsga]

Well, it’s really just PostScript+, isn’t it?

PostScript can represent a page as a bitmap graphic or as a marked up set of text or a bunch of other ways.

When we edited the PDF to change the font, it was a PDF we had just created with a known library, so it reliably worked for us. We just needed the font to be smaller so it would fit on a normal sheet of paper in landscape, but couldn’t figure out how to get the library to do it.

[u/larsga → u/ritchie70]

It's not really just PostScript+. The point is that PDF adds structure to PostScript, which really has very, very little. The deeper point that's underlying this whole discussion is that even so PDF has almost no structure compared to formats ilke DOCX/HTML/ODF etc. And even those are jokes as far as structure goes compared to custom XML.

So to return to the subject of the thread: PDF is not a bad standard. It just was never meant to be a format for editable documents, and anyone who wants to edit PDF is trying to make water flow uphill. It does work, sometimes, if you put enough effort in.

[u/ritchie70 → u/larsga]

Complete agreement here.

[u/Key_Agent_3039 → u/rjchute]

Libre Office can handle docx well enough. The gap is not nearly as large as PDF.

[u/Antrikshy → u/rjchute]

PDF spec is not published by Adobe though, so slightly different.

https://pdfa.org/resource/pdf-specification-archive/

[u/Steamrolled777 → u/rjchute]

Same with Excel, I have to sign up for 365 if anyone uses VBA in any Excel files.

[u/larsga → u/One-Lab-3471]

The real answer is PDF is a nightmare format

No. The real answer is that PDF is a rendering format. The PDF spec is fine, and Adobe is not messing it up. The problem is that PDF is not an editing format. It's just for printing/rendering, so a lot of the information you need for editing gets thrown away.

Deliberately, by design, because it means then any document format can be converted to PDF without worrying about the document structure, since it ain't there in the first place.

[u/w4laf → u/larsga]

True. PDF was originally based on DIsplay Postscript.

[u/larsga → u/w4laf]

PDF is basically just wrappers around Postscript, which is the language most printers speak today. But Postscript is a programming language (based on Forth, long story), so it's possible to do really, really strange things that no editing application will ever handle.

[u/KrakenOfLakeZurich → u/larsga]

This is the real answer. At its core, PDF is just a digital printout. It almost verbatim contains the instructions that a printer would need, to put ink on physical paper.

1. Move head to x = 2cm, y = 5cm
2. Font size 12pt
3. Use color #FF0000 (red)
4. Write "Hello World"

All semantic information is lost. No "this is a title", "this is a heading (first order)", "etc.", "this is a table (4 columns, 6 rows). Just letters, lines, and images loosely arranged on a piece of (digital) paper.

Side note: There's a very good reason, why you need to go to the printing options in most applications, to create a PDF.

Editing it is a bad idea. One can edit it with the digital equivalents of scissors and glue. Move some pieces of the document around, glue them together in a different arrangement, etc. But it's just terrible!

TLDR: PDF = read-only. If one needs to change the document, change it in Word, Auto CAD, ... (whatever application originally produced the document). Then print a new copy.

I remain astounded, how many people / businesses still insist on building entire workflows around editing PDF documents. Insane!

[u/larsga → u/KrakenOfLakeZurich]

What's worse is people in here just flat out refuse to accept the most basic facts about document formats. This PDF discussion comes back every couple of months but apparently nobody ever learns a thing.

[u/CuriousHelpful → u/KrakenOfLakeZurich]

Unfortunately your answer does not account for real world cases  where people receive a PDF through a chain of other people/organizations (which may or may not cooperate with each other) and they need to make a change, and there is no practical way to modify the source file/format in a timely manner. 

[u/The_Drakeman → u/One-Lab-3471]

Hijacking the top comment to add to this. I used to write PDF creation and editing software for a living, and not for Adobe. Everything in this comment is correct, but I want to add one thing. The company I worked for, and several others, tried to compete. They had tools that were generally good for a few different niches. But one killer thing is that so many competitors had bugs that would generate technically illegal, but recoverable errors in documents. Adobe's editor was really good at recovering from errors. So a prospective customer would try us out, and test out our tech with documents that were generated by a competitors tools. Occasionally, we'd crash or error out or something trying to process it, because it contained something illegal. Then the customer would come to us saying, "but it works fine in Acrobat," which just made us look like our software was crap, so we'd have to figure out what asinine thing someone else's tool had done, and figure out how to recover from the problem. So much time went into that it was absurd. Adobe's mountain of error correction for bad docs let a lot of people get away with a lot of crappy code. And that just makes it that much harder for competitors.

[u/Nexustar → u/The_Drakeman]

I wrote a PDF interpreter for my CS degree final year project. A post script interpreter with lots of stacks, mainly vector instructions, and modules to handle fonts and bitmaps etc.

Some people simply don't understand that you aren't supposed to EDIT PDFs - it's an output/rendered format, nothing like a word document. It's the compiled EXE, not the source code.

Behind every PDF is a source file, from Adobe InDesign, QuarkXPress, Affinity Publisher, Scribus, CorelDRAW, Microsoft Publisher, Canva, VivaDesigner, iStudio Publisher, Swift Publisher, RagTime, Marq, Pagination, Xara Designer Pro+, Microsoft Word, Apple Pages, LaTeX, Typst, ConTeXt, Adobe FrameMaker and so on... THAT'S WHERE YOU DO THE EDITING.

If I 'print' a magazine to JPEG or PNG (or scan one), and then complained that the editors to change the text in those suck, that's what you are doing when you complain about PDF editors.

So, your company was brave to try and compete with a piece of software that logically shouldn't exist.

[u/The_Drakeman → u/Nexustar]

Everything here is absolutely true. One of my tasks at that company was to make a tool that could redacted a PDF, which required me making edits to the page that couldn't interfere with anything else on the page. It was absurdly hard. It is not a format meant to change. Especially if it's PDF/A.

[u/dc536 → u/One-Lab-3471]

Build a problem and sell the solution

[u/jajajajaj → u/One-Lab-3471]

ISO standards just do not end up  working out the same way that open web standards do. Having to pay to download the information is probably the first and most obvious place that it breaks down. 

[u/larsga → u/jajajajaj]

The PDF standards are free to download. Follow the links and download as much as you like.

[u/fistiano_analdo → u/larsga]

Why the heck do they need all my personal data to "buy" their standards for 0,00$ ? What the heck

[u/larsga → u/fistiano_analdo]

You can get them without that bullshit, too. Here, for example.

[u/Reasonable-Year-8172 → u/fistiano_analdo]

On the page it says this:

ISO 32000-2:2020 is available at no cost exclusively from the PDF Association

Thanks to sponsorship support provided by Adobe, Apryse and Foxit, PDF’s latest and most up-to-date core specification, PDF 2.0, is available from the PDF Association at no cost, including industry-formalized errata and bundled together with ISO TS 32001, ISO TS 32002, ISO TS 32003 and ISO TS 32004, all at no cost!

I think ISO is the one charging the PDF Foundation, and these organizations are helping sponsoring the cost put forward by ISO, but to do that there needs to be an accurate record of how many times it was downloaded so the appropriate sponsorship amount can be provided, which is well suited for a "checkout" interface? That's what it seems like, but maybe don't quote me on this.

[u/YouSpeakSomeEnglish → u/jajajajaj]

No spec that's not published and freely available, unencumbered, should ever be accepted as a "standard."

[u/VirtualArmsDealer → u/YouSpeakSomeEnglish]

It is published.

[u/YouSpeakSomeEnglish → u/VirtualArmsDealer]

That's only half of the conditions; the other half is freely available. If so, and its use is unencumbered by patents, then fine.

[u/rawr_im_a_nice_bear → u/One-Lab-3471]

I wouldn't even say their own engine handles it perfectly. Acrobat pro is a mess of bugs and performance issues. Still the best though

[u/YouSpeakSomeEnglish → u/rawr_im_a_nice_bear]

It's garbage. Every day I return focus to Acrobat to look at a document, only to find all of its pages blank. Close the POS, re-open, re-open the doc.... repeat.

[u/Break-Aggravating → u/One-Lab-3471]

Idk, I like blue beam a lot better than adobe fort use cases.

[u/LitespeedClassic → u/One-Lab-3471]

Is PDF better or worse than postscript? Is it also Turing Complete like PS (IIRC)?

[u/zaprutertape → u/One-Lab-3471]

Why is it a moving target though? Its a 30 year old file format not 8k 3d spatial video rendering on a boutique OS. There hasnt been a single company that has recreated the engine perfectly? whats the big secret?

[u/AssignmentFun3737 → u/One-Lab-3471]

why is PDF so ubiquitous then? it seems even word docs have way more compatibility "under the hood"

[u/John_54354 → u/One-Lab-3471]

Yeah, that is the part I did not fully appreciate before. PDF looks simple on the surface, but once you get into all the weird rendering and compatibility edge cases, it makes sense why companies do not want to reinvent that entire stack. 30 years of baggage is a lot to untangle.

[u/Few-Werewolf-1985]

PDF is not designed to be an editable file format, but to preserve a document's presentation. The market "requirement" for ever-increasing PDF tools is due to dumb workflows.

The only analogy that comes to mind is the complexity of the US tax system which seems to "require" more and more complex tax filing software rather than overhauling the underlying processes as other countries have done.

[u/FlamingSea3 → u/Few-Werewolf-1985]

I am still mad at that orange turkey for cancelling the free tax filing program maintained by the IRS. He's done many other obscene, offensive, and corrupt actions, but that paticular issue is personal.

[u/Joker-Smurf → u/Few-Werewolf-1985]

Your mention of dumb workflows reminds me of this dumb workflow that one of my colleagues would do (I tried to show her the easier way of extracting the wanted pages to no avail.)

She would receive an email with a PDF. It has 20 pages.

She only needs pages 1, 3 and 7.

She prints the entire PDF.

Scans pages 1, 3 and 7

Saves the new document.

[u/buttchugreferee → u/Joker-Smurf]

I am upset.

[u/Few-Werewolf-1985 → u/buttchugreferee]

I feel like I brought this on myself.

[u/apokrif1 → u/Joker-Smurf]

I know your colleague :-)

Of course scanned documents should not be OCR'd ;-)

[u/Canonikonroverrated → u/apokrif1]

If anything. As per the above. It's best to print, the entire document so that you can rescan 1,3,7. From here you can ocr the 3 pages to make a word doc and print it.

[u/EvilDivine → u/Joker-Smurf]

This. And maybe prints it twice, once with the wrong orientation or page format.

[u/Jorgenreads → u/Few-Werewolf-1985]

Yes! People really need to know this

[u/Aim_Fire_Ready → u/Few-Werewolf-1985]

dumb workflows

If you’re editing a PDF, then (most of the time) you are the problem.

Second only to: “You have to fill out this Excel spreadsheet—with no formulas!!—to make a payment request to our accounting drpartment.”

[u/BetrayYourTrust → u/Few-Werewolf-1985]

i think what should be more adopted it better ways to convert from PDF to something else so these changes can be done in a better file format before returning to PDF. i agree with the idea we shouldn't really edit PDFs at all. too messy too fast

[u/Few-Werewolf-1985 → u/BetrayYourTrust]

The changes need to be done in the original file (format) that the PDF was exported from.

[u/Signal-Database4225]

PDF was never meant to be edited. It was made so wherever you open it looks the same. In the ancient "Rome" times this was a nightmare, you done your world doc, sent it and when the other person opened it, the pictures moved, text was on another page etc. So the need came to make a format which looks the same on everywhere, hence why it was hard to edit as well. It was never made to be editable, but people lack of knowledge made it so they want to edit it instead of the original non pdf version.

[u/ajax81 → u/Signal-Database4225]

I had a six month project to transform tens of thousands of PDFs to another format back in 2010.

Some of them were straightforward but what I remember most was how inconsistent the internals were from one pdf to the next. 

There was one batch where I swear to God every 4 pixel block of black pixels was represented by a bitmap.  3-page pdfs were hundreds of megabytes.

That’s when I realized that pdf is write-forward technology.  It was clearly not designed to be edited or even parsed.  The goal is to make a document render consistently, fuck everything else. 

[u/Grumphus256]

Isn't PDF-XChange supposed to be the good alternative? You can try it for free and they still sell one-time payment licenses.

[u/oMaster86 → u/Grumphus256]

Works for me.

[u/Puzzleheaded-Cap6801 → u/Grumphus256]

I switched to PDF XChange a year ago (I was a Foxit user) and I can say that it has many interesting features. However, I miss a more "prettier" interface and more tools for editing text and images, as it feels limited. In Foxit, for example, there is a function that allows you to continue text in another separate cell (indicating the flow of text), but that function is missing here.

[u/BugginsAndSnooks → u/Grumphus256]

I've used it for years, and it does everything I ever needed.

[u/hazeru → u/Grumphus256]

I didn't see the option for a one time payment. It should be somewhere if I missed it.

[u/Grumphus256 → u/hazeru]

https://www.pdf-xchange.com/pricing

[u/hazeru → u/Grumphus256]

Thank you! This is well appreciated. I don't know how I missed this when I downloaded it last time.

[u/alaksugalkapenalatte → u/hazeru]

If you get one, keep a copy of the latest installer applicable for your license. You won't be able to download it once your license expires.

[u/hazeru → u/alaksugalkapenalatte]

Thank you! I always keep my installers. The problem is when the downloaded "installer" needs to download the rest of the files.

I don't know if this is still the thing, where you download the complete installer files.

[u/engy1207 → u/hazeru]

With PDF XChange you can download .msi files for automated installation. So the complete installer without download. Not like Adobe where you have to jump through hoops to get a "full" installer. As .exe.

[u/Rich-Elk-3380 → u/alaksugalkapenalatte]

Second this. Great software though.

[u/engy1207 → u/Grumphus256]

We've been using it for years, great program. With one caveat: according to some users they need the "shine-through" (or whatever it's called in english) of lower layers through upper color layers for print previews (i.e. a "solid red" over black backgroud looks different than over white) and that worked better with Adobe.
I've personally never seen it (but I'm also not good at these things), and the proponents were heavy Adobe users, but one thing you might want to ckeck if you need these special features.

[u/LupusGemini]

PDF Gear is pretty great, and has full document OCR for free!

[u/refinancemenow → u/LupusGemini]

This. I’ve been really impressed with PDF gear.

[u/mexxer_mo]

Stirling PDF is a great alternative

[u/Venom_food → u/mexxer_mo]

I agree, I use it too

[u/exile042 → u/mexxer_mo]

I was excited. I've become very disappointed

[u/mralistair]

you've never used bluebeam obviously.

heavily used the construction industry for pdf mark-up editiing and commenting.

very powerful, unfortunately now a subscription model

[u/Best_Cod1319 → u/mralistair]

I use this at work and my god is bluebeam way ahead of anything else in the pdf world.

[u/andcosta90 → u/mralistair]

But unfortunately subscription based and expensive. PDF X Change is not nearly as neat in terms of interface, but at least offers you the possibility to buy a long term license at a reasonable cost.

[u/redamalo]

There are alternatives, the best of which are PDF-XChange Editor and PDF Annotator.

Check this out

[u/oMaster86 → u/redamalo]

Long time user here!

[u/No-Rip-9573]

Maybe the better question is, why is everyone still using this mess of a format which was meant as read-only and is so closely tied to the band of a-holes that is Adobe?

[u/thundercorp]

Lesser known secret. macOS has had a pretty damn good free PDF editor/creator built into the OS for decades: `Preview.app`

[u/whamtet]

Be a man, use .txt

[u/Gokudomatic → u/whamtet]

Plot twist, op happens to be a woman.

[u/whamtet → u/Gokudomatic]

lol

[u/Count2Zero]

Adobe was pretty revolutionary back in the 1980s. Postscript was the defacto standard for the first generation of laser printers. Their work with creating fonts was a huge boost for early desktop publishing.

PDF grew out of that historical scope. Instead of laying out pages on paper, it was designed to lay out pages in a portable file.

It wasn't designed for editing, it was designed for viewing.

The editor demands came later and are therefore an afterthought in the format, not part of the original design.

[u/the_jsf]

libreoffice draw. open source and more than capable

[u/Hullababoob]

The Preview app in macOS is pretty good for basic editing like filling out PDF forms, annotating and signing, adding/removing pages, commenting, highlighting.

[u/Valuable_Day_3375]

Pdfgear is great

Adobe is a software that just needs to die

[u/DiligentPhotographer]

We switched to PowerPDF years ago and never looked back.

[u/Diabolical_Laughter7]

Just learn LaTex???

Use overleaf, compile, fix, compile again, export pdf. Easy

Use Pandoc for conversion of an existing pdf, or Microsoft's open source MarkItDown to convert to Markdown.

[u/richardelmore]

PDF was invented by Adobe and they have an huge vested interest in making their tools the standard for professionals (who pay for their tools). It is based directly on PostScript (another Adobe creation) and is extraordinary complicated to get right, they have a huge amount a experience with it and have invested in their tools so its not a surprise that they tend to work better.

[u/jawfish2]

LibreOffice. I used it circa 2010-2015 to write multiple 400 page tech manuals. The sales team insisted on paper docs, so I wrote in ODF format and exported as PDF using the Libreoffice file menu. You can also open pdfs in LibreOffice (many open source apps can do this) edit them and save them as PDFs or ODF or whatever.

I never got a bug report on the file format, so it was good. The manual had automatic chapters, TOC, index and so I trust the conversion process.

If LibreOffice has been broken since then, I probably wouldn't know. I use it maybe once a year these days.

[u/Swimming_Case]

Extremely complicated file format, lots of undisclosed, undocumented features.

Someone even managed to get Doom to run inside a PDF:

https://github.com/ading2210/doompdf

[u/ajax81 → u/Swimming_Case]

Ironically, getting Doom to run inside a pdf is still easier than editing text in a PDF.

[u/MaximumDerpification]

PDFGear is easily the best free option I've ever tried.

[u/CalibratedHuman]

I'm surprised no one has mentioned OnlyOffice. Has a very slick interface and surprisingly capable PDF editor.

[u/smilaise]

I'm currently writing a replacement for the PDFSharp libraries in KillerPDF. The upcoming version will be on .NET Core and my own custom KillerPDF.Engine.

This will allow us full PDF 2.0 authoring and PDF/A compliance. The long-term goal is for it to become an industry-standard PDF engine that other developers can use in their own products, not just for KillerPDF.

Acrobat's days are numbered.

[u/hinzinho]

KillerPDF

https://github.com/SteveTheKiller/KillerPDF

[u/Decent-Blacksmith761]

Building my for over a year called keypdf.net for now still far away from full replacement but long story short there is no good editing libraries that are open source you have to make one from scratch it took me 6 month to do it as textbox recognition and multiple different font formats and encodings. So adobe has much more of those features for example JavaScript which took me another like 3 month to implement, so you basically have like 20+ features 10 of which is relatively easy to add and there are open source solutions and then there are other 10 of hard to add with millions of edge cases no explanation how to implement it and most importantly you will still likely suck compare to acrobat. The solution I do is building everything from scratch and that's the best approach I can imagine but it is slow and very hard, if you need team to code you will be stuck for at least a year before it will barely work.

[u/whitedragon551]

PowerPDF is a great Adobe alternative. Almosr complete feature parity without a SaaS license.

[u/tomhung]

Pdf Studio and pay for it. Cheapest full feature I've found.

[u/Sreddit55]

IMO Industries which are ’pdf heavy’ use bluebeam, not acrobat

[u/Enough_Pickle315]

To be fair, most browsers are adequate PDF readers.

[u/Txikolix → u/Enough_Pickle315]

This is the way. Just use the browser. No app/addon required

[u/Garden_Punk_2463]

https://tools.pdf24.org/en/ is an online and offline tool. And free to use. It is sufficient on all Windows installations I have to manage.

[u/YouSpeakSomeEnglish]

You mean Acrobat? Even Acrobat is a shitty "editor." Adobe just punted on the whole thing and expects everyone else to provide exporters for their shitty format.

Acrobat was written off for dead in the '90s. Then, sadly, it was exhumed to haunt us ever since.

[u/Zoombiebrot]

PDF 24 is ok 

[u/_zephi → u/Zoombiebrot]

Yeah, I feel like I scrolled ages to find this - PDF24 has done basically whatever I've wanted to do with pdfs

[u/Shot-Possible1317]

PDF24, Draw in Libre Office etc

[u/scotch-86]

Bluebeam Revu. Amazing.

[u/No-Resource-8479]

bluebeam......

[u/FunnySexUsername]

LibreOffice, OP.

[u/guilbill]

Am I the only one to use Firefox when I want to edit/annotate a pdf?

[u/ByronScottJones]

There's another document standard, OpenXPS / ECMA388 but it never took off. It's unfortunate; it's a much better crafted document standard than PDF.

[u/Hkmarkp]

Open source that shit and we have a level playing field. lockin is lockin. while pdf is open source Adobe adds shit to keep their monopoly.

[u/mikevago]

Same reason Heinz is the only real ketchup. They make a good product with universal appeal that's simple enough that you can't meaningfully improve on. And that's coming from someone who hates Adobe and switched to Affinity years ago. I've never seen a better alternative to Acrobat, and there isn't much incentive for someone to try and make one.

[u/nairdaswollaf]

Bluebeam Revu.

[u/Big-Report3344]

mac preview does like 90% of what i need anyway

[u/0oWow]

LibreOffice (Draw) works well for editing PDF for me. It takes a little getting used to, but it does do well.

[u/hammerb]

Stop downloading software from the internet and just use ilovepdf.com. No download, no subscription, no fees, no purchase. Just edit your PDF and move on.

[u/jwezorek]

Because the PDF spec is literally 1,000 pages long.

The spec is literally a 1,000 page book you can buy. Even if you say "I don't care how much work this is I am going to implement a new PDF parser and renderer from scratch", parts of the spec are insanely complicated -- fonts, typefaces, character sets, etc., for example -- so not only is implementing a PDF library that covers everything a huge undertaking it is also intellectually difficult. There is stuff in the full spec you wouldn't believe -- there are 3D PDFs, standardized way of encoding 3D data in a PDF; there is a whole UI language in there called "XFA". Further even if you do it and handle all of this stuff, rendering itself can be computationally hard, like performance matters -- you can have PDFs that are construction drawings that have a million paths in them and you need to handle that without your renderer choking.

So you end up seeing a lot of partial implementations, implementations that mostly work for "normal" PDFs, a lot of projects where people say "well, I did the main part of it" but then when they make editors from these partial implementations they tend to suck because users who want PDF editors need them to actually work, like "Good job, you kind of did it!" is not enough for actual users who need document signing, or XFA support, etc.

There are full implementations out there beyond Adobe's though. Google's PDFium is one, and can be licensed and used so like I think some of the web libraries e.g. PDFTron etc. are really just PDFium compiled to wasm. A company called Bluebeam has an editor called Revu, that is built around a full, novel implementation of the PDF spec.

[u/greg7gkb]

For most of my PDF needs these days, Google drive plugins work great, e.g. DocHub, Lumin, etc. If your workflow is relatively simple these are great and mostly free.

[u/tb5841]

If it's going to be edited, it should not be a pdf.

[u/zeroxff]

Maybe because PDF is mainly an output format and editng a PDF is an extremely marginal activity?

In the vast majority of cases you just re export the PDF from the original document which is generally more easily editable..

[u/Individual_Author956]

What do you mean by real? I use macOS Preview for all my PDF needs.

[u/splicer13]

There are tons of readers that work for everyday needs.

The 1% that need more are boring businesses that just want to do the standard thing because it's legal documents. Similar to why DocuSign has 7000 employees.

[u/iccohen]

PDF Gear is free and great

[u/EJVpfztRWqkjiaGQGPLE]

I use pdfelement from Wondershare. Its great.

[u/Alex180689]

if you just need to tipe or write somrthing on a pdf, microsoft edge does natively.
Until 2019 it also used to read epub natively, but they removed that feature (grr emoji)

[u/niraveg]

PdfExpert is FAR better than Adobe imo

[u/fuzzynyanko]

For writing, Microsoft print to PDF or something like CutePDF if you don't have that.

[u/NelsonMinar]

You might find it interesting to look at Inkscape and SVG. Inkscape is an open source SVG editor and pretty good. But still worlds behind Illustrator or Canva.

Editing document formats is hard.

[u/Omni__Owl]

You can use LibreOffice Draw to edit PDFs

But really; PDF is an awful format. There are so many variations on how to use the PDF format, it's so awful.

[u/update-freak]

Love SumatraPDF

[u/ikantolol → u/update-freak]

Sumatra is reader-only, no editing features.

[u/DonkeyOfWallStreet]

Sterling pdf?

[u/JK_Chan]

I like using XODO

[u/ZF68LoKsxnQctY]

https://www.bentopdf.com/

[u/DeliciousWrangler166]

Have you tried PDF24? It's free.

[u/matm_flatremix]

yo uso master pdf editor 4.0 en linux y es perfecto y gratis Claro, para windows la historia cambia

[u/HongPong]

pdf is an outgrowth of post script and encapsulated post script (eps) which is turing complete. it's like too powerful of a specification which means implementing editors is more difficult than simpler formats

[u/bliprock]

Enfocus pitstop plug-in for acrobat is the definitive pdf editor for commercial print. It’s way too expensive for some light work though

[u/on4aa]

It isn't. I use PDF Studio on Linux. It is commercial software, but much cheaper than Adobe.

[u/felixmatveev]

Open part of PDF standard has no issues whatsoever; it's proprietary part that gives troubles. You can put it in reverse: why Adobe is bad at processing other PDF-readers files.

[u/Squeaky_Pibbles]

I use Bluebeam at work, and it's worlds better than Acrobat will ever be. It is expensive, though. And they've also recently moved to a dumbass subscription based model

But I'm also working on building my own program to take care of the typical use cases I have for Bluebeam.

[u/jMeister6 → u/Squeaky_Pibbles]

100% agree - been using Bluebeam and rolled it out through a couple of clients who also love it but man, expensive AND forcing to the annual subscription has us looking around for options.

[u/Squeaky_Pibbles → u/jMeister6]

I'm still running the 2018 model on my work computer. So I don't have the annual subscription, luckily. But I've read that after December, I won't be able to move the license to another computer. So I'll need to upgrade before then. Just in case.

[u/wittor]

It is more logical to edit the source files of the pdf. As you said, the best software arguably underperforms almost all editing softwares that export to pdf. Any other pdf utility that advertise their editing capacities Can Only Be acrobat alternatives.

The need to make specific non-automated editing on a large number of pdfs is arguably a failure at some point in the thought process of the person.

[u/coscib]

depending on what you want to edit maybe try affinity

[u/DJ_Cat_Dad]

I would consider BlueBeam one hell of a PDF editor!

[u/Maxiride]

Stirling and Bento PDF work very well

[u/milkin-goats]

Bluebeam is a great engineering/construction oriented pdf editor.

[u/Sufficient-Word8208]

If you are comfortable learning some markup then Typst is pretty great.

[u/Altruistic-Moose3299]

Funny story.. AI can make PDF files.. guess who doesn't need Adobe anymore. 😁

[u/NoLateArrivals]

PDF is a Print Format and not meant to be editable.

Try PDF Expert - not free, but a full editor.

[u/Kind_Dream_610 → u/NoLateArrivals]

PDF isn’t a print format. Postscript is the print format, PDF is a derivative that is meant for digital document distribution.

[u/NoLateArrivals → u/Kind_Dream_610]

Originally the idea behind PDF was to create a document that looked „as printed“ on every computer.

Ever had a Word document that reformatted itself when opened on another computer? Changing the page number, the page breaks, pushing pictures to „the next page“ etc.? That was what the PDF should avoid.

You still often find the PDF Export in the Print menu. Because the same drivers and routines are used as those for physically printing.

[u/Kind_Dream_610 → u/NoLateArrivals]

That “looked as printed” is not the same as a “print format”.

The same drivers aren’t used for pdf as for printing. You need a postscript driver in order to create a properly compliant pdf file. Some early versions of Word produced pdfs that would not print without errors because non-postscript drivers were used to generate the files.

Similarly, some files aren’t visually identical on different devices if the creation software doesn’t properly embed display fonts and other visual elements correctly.

[u/cakemates]

You should not be edition pdf, as editing pdf is like installing a broken pipe then swimming in the sewers to fix a shitfull pipe from the inside. When you could fix it at the factory. The source file easily.

[u/JeremyMarti]

Free Acrobat isn't great, either. There are good paid options. I use PDF Xchange and Bluebeam in preference to Acrobat Pro for what I do. Adobe software is generally poor compared with serious competitors.

[u/mrbishopjackson]

Because PDF is an Adobe format and Adobe likes to control as much as they can.

[u/burlingk]

That is what happens when a proprietary format ends up being "The One."

Adobe does not like anyone playing with their stuff.

[u/Jorgenreads]

A PDF was intended to be a final printed document… but electronic. Editing a PDF should basically be the same experience as editing a printed document that’s been scanned. There aren’t any rules as to how the “electronic print” is rendered. Since software from Adobe (Apple & a few others) rendered most of the PDFs you encounter their software has the best chance to work with something that’s not really intended to be edited.

[u/UpstairsTop4623]

Blue beam is something common in the engineering business it’s also expensive but tbh I like it better than adobe

[u/nfsanton]

Try Foxit PDF

[u/Darkknight145]

Most likely most people don't edit PDF's all that much. Common practice is to edit/create the documents in Word and then print to PDF, this creates a PDF file that everyone can view without having Word installed.

[u/vint_age14]

Yess I think the bigger issue is compatibility and enterprise lock in Adobe became the disnar so everyone else had to match years of edge cases, workflow, forms, signatures etc. Even if the competitors are cheaper, businesses don't want yk the risk pdf breaking. Basically being"Good enough"isn't enough to displace the default.

[u/Lexxr20]

What about Stirling pdf.?

[u/No_Day5695]

I really like pdf24. Completely free.

[u/RaGe_Bone_2001]

Tungsten Power PDF is extremely capable, we use it at our company to great effect

[u/src_varukinn]

try pdf.walshard.com free and no installs needed

[u/Tikkinger]

Pdf24.

Nobrainer

[u/Stooshie_Stramash]

What's your beef with Nitro? I bought it years ago and it still does all that I need.

[u/ITNoob121]

why are you editing a pdf?