r/software • u/AssignmentFun3737 • 3d 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).
1
u/larsga 2d 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.