r/software • u/AssignmentFun3737 • Aug 24 '26
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).
135
u/Few-Werewolf-1985 Aug 24 '26
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.
17
u/Joker-Smurf Aug 25 '26
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.
8
→ More replies (2)2
u/apokrif1 Aug 25 '26
I know your colleague :-)
Of course scanned documents should not be OCR'd ;-)
→ More replies (1)36
u/FlamingSea3 Aug 24 '26
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.
4
7
u/Aim_Fire_Ready Aug 24 '26
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.”
1
u/BetrayYourTrust Aug 25 '26
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
2
u/Few-Werewolf-1985 Aug 25 '26
The changes need to be done in the original file (format) that the PDF was exported from.
14
u/Signal-Database4225 Aug 25 '26
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.
7
u/ajax81 Aug 25 '26 edited Aug 25 '26
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.
34
u/Grumphus256 Aug 24 '26
Isn't PDF-XChange supposed to be the good alternative? You can try it for free and they still sell one-time payment licenses.
6
5
3
u/Puzzleheaded-Cap6801 Aug 24 '26
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.
2
u/hazeru Aug 24 '26
I didn't see the option for a one time payment. It should be somewhere if I missed it.
2
u/alaksugalkapenalatte Aug 25 '26
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.
→ More replies (1)2
u/hazeru Aug 25 '26
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.
2
u/engy1207 Aug 25 '26
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.
2
u/engy1207 Aug 25 '26
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.1
23
9
8
u/mralistair Aug 25 '26
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
2
u/Best_Cod1319 Aug 25 '26
I use this at work and my god is bluebeam way ahead of anything else in the pdf world.
1
u/andcosta90 Aug 25 '26
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.
24
u/redamalo Aug 24 '26
There are alternatives, the best of which are PDF-XChange Editor and PDF Annotator.
Check this out
3
1
5
u/No-Rip-9573 Aug 25 '26
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?
3
u/thundercorp Aug 25 '26
Lesser known secret. macOS has had a pretty damn good free PDF editor/creator built into the OS for decades: `Preview.app`
2
u/International-Pen940 Aug 27 '26
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.
4
4
u/Count2Zero Aug 25 '26
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.
3
3
u/Hullababoob Aug 25 '26
The Preview app in macOS is pretty good for basic editing like filling out PDF forms, annotating and signing, adding/removing pages, commenting, highlighting.
3
3
3
u/Diabolical_Laughter7 Aug 25 '26
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.
9
u/richardelmore Aug 24 '26
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 Aug 24 '26
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 Aug 25 '26
Extremely complicated file format, lots of undisclosed, undocumented features.
Someone even managed to get Doom to run inside a PDF:
5
u/ajax81 Aug 25 '26
Ironically, getting Doom to run inside a pdf is still easier than editing text in a PDF.
4
4
u/CalibratedHuman Aug 25 '26
I'm surprised no one has mentioned OnlyOffice. Has a very slick interface and surprisingly capable PDF editor.
6
u/smilaise Steve the Killer Aug 24 '26 edited Aug 29 '26
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.
EDIT: The KillerPDF.Engine is out now! Developer guide is available too! https://killerpdf.net
2
u/Decent-Blacksmith761 Aug 24 '26
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 Aug 24 '26
PowerPDF is a great Adobe alternative. Almosr complete feature parity without a SaaS license.
2
2
u/Zoombiebrot Aug 25 '26
PDF 24 is ok
1
u/_zephi Aug 25 '26
Yeah, I feel like I scrolled ages to find this - PDF24 has done basically whatever I've wanted to do with pdfs
1
2
2
2
u/jwezorek Aug 25 '26 edited Aug 26 '26
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
2
2
u/Csabika_ Sep 02 '26
Adobe Acrobat is just an overpriced nagware nowadays. It felt so good uninstalling it and just using PDFGear. I wish there was a viable alternative for every other Adobe product too.
1
u/Garden_Punk_2463 Aug 25 '26
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 Aug 25 '26
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
1
1
1
1
1
u/ByronScottJones Aug 25 '26
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 Aug 25 '26 edited Aug 25 '26
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 Aug 25 '26
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
1
1
u/0oWow Aug 25 '26
LibreOffice (Draw) works well for editing PDF for me. It takes a little getting used to, but it does do well.
1
u/hammerb Aug 25 '26
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 Aug 25 '26
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
1
u/zeroxff Aug 25 '26
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 Aug 25 '26
What do you mean by real? I use macOS Preview for all my PDF needs.
1
u/splicer13 Aug 25 '26
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
1
u/Alex180689 Aug 25 '26
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
1
u/fuzzynyanko Aug 25 '26
For writing, Microsoft print to PDF or something like CutePDF if you don't have that.
1
u/NelsonMinar Aug 25 '26
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 Aug 25 '26
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
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
u/ccuser011 Aug 26 '26
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 Aug 26 '26
I use PDF X-change, works really well for me. What are you trying to do with the PDFs?
1
1
1
1
u/MeanTato Aug 26 '26
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 Aug 26 '26
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
1
1
u/OldArmadillo2710 Aug 27 '26
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
1
u/Wyrade Aug 27 '26
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
1
u/JournalistIll1525 Aug 27 '26
PowerPDF, has the look and feel of Office. Great Value for a one time purchase!
1
u/sevnollogic Aug 27 '26
I wish we formalised HTML/css for print and built browsers based around that format dedicated to print.
I guess it would be a group effort to get people to adopt though
1
1
u/weaverk Aug 28 '26
The pdf part of wps office is pretty lit, I switched over because it was so much cheaper, no regrets so far
1
u/podiasity128 Aug 28 '26
Bluebeam is not only a real PDF editor, it is far better and far more capable than Acrobat and has been for a decade.
1
1
1
u/jasper_de_w Aug 29 '26
pdfs seem simple but handling real-world files is rough. xfa is a 756-page spec with its own layout engine and scripting language. adobe deprecated it in pdf 2.0, but those forms stuck around. we tested 50,000 real pdfs without a single crash. adobe silently fixes broken files, which explains why competitors struggle. building this taught me a lot.
1
u/YazjiOsama Aug 30 '26
I use SumatraPDF to read pdf files, it's very light, nothing fancy just you and the pdf file
1
1
u/Beautiful_Figure6917 Sep 05 '26
There is revpdf, which is completely free on desktop and have mature set of features and editor.
1
368
u/One-Lab-3471 Aug 24 '26
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