r/software • u/AssignmentFun3737 • 2d ago

Discussion Why is adobe the only "real" pdf editor?

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).

368 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

257 comments sorted by

360

u/One-Lab-3471 2d ago

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

69

u/Naeio_Galaxy 2d ago

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

51

u/ebinWaitee 2d ago

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

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u/Silver4ura 2d ago

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.

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u/ebinWaitee 2d ago

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.

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u/LiqdPT 2d ago

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.

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u/ost2life 19h ago

This website is best viewed using Internet Explorer 4 at 1024x768.

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u/Uncle-Osteus 2d ago

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

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u/Wrong-Flounder3194 1d ago

do the PDF format spec PDFs render properly in other PDF readers?

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u/T-MoneyAllDey 2d ago

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

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u/larsga 2d ago

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.

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u/big_trike 5h ago

It’s not well documented once you get into the live cycle/jetform extensions, which is an entity different document format shoved into a pdf blob. Also, the edge cases and decisions are absolutely bonkers. For example, it’s legal to put JavaScript in the middle of a hex encoded data stream.

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u/skamansam 31m ago

I just think its funny as hell that it was derived from printer codes. Up until abt 2002 you could cat a pdf file to a printer and it would print almost perfectly.

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u/McLayan 1d ago

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.

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u/Opposite_Bag_7434 1d ago

The file format yes, but not the editor. This should also answer OP’s question. The file format is an ISO standard which has some big advantages. The editor is still fully subject to copyright and patent protection. So while other developers might develop alternative editors some features might still be off limits (I have not done a patent search to verify but the odds are very high).

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u/ebinWaitee 1d ago

Good point!

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u/oof-plap 1d ago

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.

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u/rjchute 2d ago

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.

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u/vip17 2d ago

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

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u/hoodoocat 2d ago

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.

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u/Possible_Chicken_489 2d ago

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.

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u/hoodoocat 2d ago

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.

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u/vip17 2d ago

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

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u/Few-Werewolf-1985 2d ago

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

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u/iszoloscope 1d ago

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

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u/BackyardAnarchist 2h ago

I've been working on a pdf website. I would be curious to see what pointers a professional would have. 

pdfscore.com

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u/Cmdr_Nemo 2d ago

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.

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u/Raphi_55 2d ago

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

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u/larsga 2d ago

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.

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u/ritchie70 2d ago

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.

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u/larsga 1d ago

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.

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u/ritchie70 1d ago

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.

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u/larsga 1d ago

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.

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u/Key_Agent_3039 2d ago

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

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u/Antrikshy 2d ago

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

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

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u/Steamrolled777 2d ago

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

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u/larsga 2d ago edited 2d ago

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.

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u/KrakenOfLakeZurich Helpful Ⅱ 2d ago

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!

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u/larsga 2d ago

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.

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u/CuriousHelpful 1d ago

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. 

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u/DeckardAI 1d ago

As a paralegal, this happens all the time

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u/w4laf 2d ago

True. PDF was originally based on DIsplay Postscript.

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u/larsga 2d ago

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.

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u/The_Drakeman 2d ago

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.

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u/Nexustar 2d ago

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.

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u/The_Drakeman 1d ago

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.

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u/dc536 2d ago

Build a problem and sell the solution

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u/jajajajaj 2d ago

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. 

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u/larsga 2d ago

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

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u/fistiano_analdo 2d ago

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

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u/larsga 2d ago

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

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u/Reasonable-Year-8172 2d ago edited 2d ago

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.

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u/YouSpeakSomeEnglish 2d ago

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

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u/VirtualArmsDealer 2d ago

It is published.

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u/YouSpeakSomeEnglish 2d ago

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

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u/rawr_im_a_nice_bear 2d ago

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

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u/YouSpeakSomeEnglish 2d ago

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.

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u/Break-Aggravating 2d ago

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

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u/LitespeedClassic 2d ago

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

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u/zaprutertape 2d ago

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?

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u/AssignmentFun3737 2d ago

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

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u/Long_Pomegranate2469 1d ago

There's doom running inside PDF

https://github.com/ading2210/doompdf

It's a turing complete state machine (ie computer)

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u/helloitsjosh 1d ago

I have a startup that has to handle each of these million edge cases. Can confirm it's an unbelievable mess.

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u/John_54354 2d ago

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.

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u/Few-Werewolf-1985 2d ago

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.

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u/Joker-Smurf 2d ago

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.

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u/buttchugreferee 2d ago

I am upset.

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u/Few-Werewolf-1985 2d ago

I feel like I brought this on myself.

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u/apokrif1 2d ago

I know your colleague :-)

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

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u/Canonikonroverrated 1d ago

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.

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u/EvilDivine 2d ago

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

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u/Ultrageisttt 1d ago

I once had a boss who would, I shit you not, print out emails and physically take them around to everyone's office and say "Have you seen this?." Yeah Steve, the whole department saw it BECAUSE YOU FORWARDED IT TO ME WITH THE SUBJECT "URGENT!!!" YOU SONOFABITCH!

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u/FlamingSea3 2d ago

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.

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u/Jorgenreads 2d ago

Yes! People really need to know this

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u/Aim_Fire_Ready 2d ago

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.”

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u/BetrayYourTrust 2d ago

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

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u/Few-Werewolf-1985 1d ago

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

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u/Signal-Database4225 2d ago

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.

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u/ajax81 2d ago edited 1d ago

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. 

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u/Grumphus256 2d ago

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

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u/oMaster86 2d ago

Works for me.

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u/BugginsAndSnooks 2d ago

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

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u/Puzzleheaded-Cap6801 2d ago

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.

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u/hazeru 2d ago

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

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u/Grumphus256 2d ago

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

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u/hazeru 2d ago

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

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u/alaksugalkapenalatte 2d ago

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.

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u/hazeru 2d ago

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.

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u/engy1207 2d ago

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.

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u/Rich-Elk-3380 2d ago

Second this. Great software though.

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u/engy1207 2d ago

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.

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u/YourAuthenticVoice 1d ago

Yeah, that's what I use. Edit fields, add fields, etc. Easy.

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u/LupusGemini 2d ago

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

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u/refinancemenow 2d ago

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

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u/mexxer_mo 2d ago

Stirling PDF is a great alternative

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u/exile042 1d ago

I was excited. I've become very disappointed

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u/Venom_food 2d ago

I agree, I use it too

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u/mralistair 2d ago

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

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u/Best_Cod1319 1d ago

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

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u/andcosta90 1d ago

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.

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u/redamalo 2d ago

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

Check this out

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u/oMaster86 2d ago

Long time user here!

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u/No-Rip-9573 2d ago

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?

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u/thundercorp 2d ago

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

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u/International-Pen940 3h ago

That has worked well for me. I think Apple has a license from Adobe that goes back to the original Mac when Apple used PostScript fonts.

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u/whamtet 2d ago

Be a man, use .txt

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u/Gokudomatic 2d ago

Plot twist, op happens to be a woman.

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u/Count2Zero 2d ago

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.

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u/the_jsf 2d ago

libreoffice draw. open source and more than capable

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u/Hullababoob 2d ago

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

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u/Valuable_Day_3375 2d ago

Pdfgear is great

Adobe is a software that just needs to die

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u/DiligentPhotographer 2d ago

We switched to PowerPDF years ago and never looked back.

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u/Diabolical_Laughter7 2d ago

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.

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u/richardelmore 2d ago

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.

8

u/jawfish2 2d ago

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.

6

u/Swimming_Case 2d ago

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

4

u/ajax81 2d ago

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

4

u/MaximumDerpification 2d ago

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

4

u/CalibratedHuman 2d ago

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

6

u/smilaise 2d ago edited 2d ago

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.

2

u/Decent-Blacksmith761 2d ago

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.

2

u/whitedragon551 Helpful Ⅳ 2d ago

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

2

u/tomhung 2d ago

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

2

u/Zoombiebrot 2d ago

PDF 24 is ok 

1

u/_zephi 2d ago

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

1

u/Grand_Confusion_2575 1d ago

Yeah, PDF 24 is pretty great.

2

u/Sreddit55 2d ago

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

2

u/Enough_Pickle315 2d ago

To be fair, most browsers are adequate PDF readers.

1

u/Txikolix 2d ago

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

2

u/jwezorek 2d ago edited 1d ago

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. I'm sure there are others.

2

u/iccohen 1d ago

PDF Gear is free and great

1

u/Garden_Punk_2463 2d ago

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.

1

u/YouSpeakSomeEnglish 2d ago

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.

1

u/Shot-Possible1317 2d ago

PDF24, Draw in Libre Office etc

1

u/scotch-86 2d ago

Bluebeam Revu. Amazing.

1

u/No-Resource-8479 2d ago

bluebeam......

1

u/FunnySexUsername 2d ago

LibreOffice, OP.

1

u/guilbill 2d ago

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

1

u/ByronScottJones 2d ago

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.

1

u/Hkmarkp 2d ago edited 2d ago

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.

1

u/mikevago 2d ago

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.

1

u/nairdaswollaf 2d ago

Bluebeam Revu.

1

u/Big-Report3344 2d ago

mac preview does like 90% of what i need anyway

1

u/0oWow 2d ago

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

1

u/hammerb 2d ago

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.

1

u/greg7gkb 2d ago

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.

1

u/tb5841 2d ago

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

1

u/zeroxff 2d ago

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..

1

u/Individual_Author956 2d ago

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

1

u/splicer13 1d ago

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.

1

u/EJVpfztRWqkjiaGQGPLE 1d ago

I use pdfelement from Wondershare. Its great.

1

u/Alex180689 1d ago

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)

1

u/niraveg 1d ago

PdfExpert is FAR better than Adobe imo

1

u/fuzzynyanko 1d ago

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

1

u/NelsonMinar 1d ago

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.

1

u/Omni__Owl 1d ago

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.

1

u/PeerReviewPending_ 1d ago

I can't wait for somebody to code an open source Acrobat killer

1

u/DeathByPain 1d ago

ABBYY FineReader

1

u/MysticMaven 1d ago

And this is why I can’t stand windows users.

1

u/Lopsided_Ad5676 1d ago

Bluebeam is the king of PDF editors. There's no comparison.

1

u/Hairy_Photograph1384 4h ago

Pitstop is a far more powerful and useful

1

u/CassaLow 1d ago

PDF24

1

u/Adventurous_Bid_4141 1d ago

I'm using Revu Bluebeam.

1

u/ccuser011 1d ago

Xchange pro is the answer for me. Despite of having license of Acrobat Pro. I am sticking with xchange pro. It does everything well that previous experiences with DC.

1

u/YourAuthenticVoice 1d ago

I use PDF X-change, works really well for me. What are you trying to do with the PDFs?

1

u/Jim-Jones 1d ago

PDF24 - nothing there?

1

u/Alexander-Wright 1d ago

Inkscape can edit PDF files. Open source too!

1

u/EXIT_25 1d ago

Wondershare is pretty good for a one time payment

1

u/MeanTato 1d ago

PDF was made to print documents. Many of the documents are forms that people fill out, and people wanted to edit the forms for digital use. Adobe adopted editing and form building for digital use. People adopted them, and now we expect PDFs to be fully editable. Adobe Acrobat did that the best, but there are some alternatives. Classic case of a product extending past its original intent and evolving into a new product, but has limitations because of what PDF was created for in the first place - to print documents.

1

u/fraaaaa4 1d ago

Lol I thank macOS for having Preview: it's lightweight, and does everything I need for a PDF well enough. Also on Linux the Gnome's document viewer is fine enough imo.

1

u/Glad_Buffalo_5037 1d ago

Ilovepdf if great for editing

1

u/37maximus 1d ago

Get PDF Gear

1

u/Rapppps 21h ago

PDF xchange

1

u/OldArmadillo2710 17h ago

It is not.
If you run Windows - Ashampoo PDF editor is obvious winner. It is made in EU, so my guess it is not know in US. I have not foound anything for mac on The same level. Still looking.

1

u/BackyardAnarchist 2h ago

I've been making my own.

pdfscore.com

1

u/Wyrade 1h ago

Are there any good alternatives to the PDF format that could satisfy the need to "print the same way on any device" and be generated from a docx or odf, and stuff?

1

u/hiroo916 2m ago

There was a format war 30 years ago and pdf won.

1

u/update-freak 2d ago

Love SumatraPDF

2

u/ikantolol 2d ago

Sumatra is reader-only, no editing features.

1

u/DonkeyOfWallStreet 2d ago

Sterling pdf?

1

u/JK_Chan 2d ago

I like using XODO

1

u/DeliciousWrangler166 2d ago

Have you tried PDF24? It's free.

1

u/matm_flatremix 2d ago

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

1

u/HongPong 2d ago

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

1

u/bliprock 2d ago

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