It's license renewal time and we're trying to cut back. It's not going well.

This reminds me of my all time favourite lost redditor that asked for a Adobe Acrobat alternative on r/freeuse (which is not about free software but very nsfw). They were extremely helpful though.

Conversely, IT is arguing about a $90 license on an employee that costs 80k. If it saves them 2 hours of productivity over the course of the year, it's an even trade, wouldn't you say?

The basic pdf editing options you can find in most browsers (including edge) is more than enough for most people

If you have a mac.. well, preview is bloody amazing

The best pdf reader for me is Okular. It is free, open source and certified with the German "Blauer Engel" for it's energy efficiency (as first software ever btw)

"Hate" is a strong word for my feelings towards Adobe Acrobat reader. But I really don't like it when I start it to view a pdf, you know the thing it is designed to do, and I have a weird popup, then a toolbar on the right with tools I can't use cause they're premium and a toolbar on the left and a toolbar at the top underneath the standard windows toolbar. I just wanna view the pdf man (also weird snapping when you scroll over a page). Haven't found anything nice yet that just works. I don't want to use Edge or a browser to view them and mupdf is too light weight. Would really like an evince for windows

Yeah, you could of course use Firefox or another cheap or free option. Regardless, it all boils down to people don’t like change. The cost of adobe is very high and staff doesn’t realize or care. Quantify the bottom line to superiors and get muscle behind your change order.

Please don't give Adobe money.

They're not Oracle. But they're trying.

You can view and edit in Firefox, use that and I bet the number of people who don’t need acrobat would jump to 99%

May I recommend SumatraPDF? It's so fast at loading and rendering the document

LibreOffice Draw does nice editing as well, I've just learned that recently

And PDF Arranger is very simple for rearranging, rotating, inserting, removing and rotating pages

It makes me sad but Adobe is the only game in town for powerful PDF editing. It's a shame no open source project seems to be there.

Permanently Deleted

https://tools.pdf24.org/en/creator

Look, say what you will, but I kinda like using Edge as a pdf reader. Its out-of-the-box PDF markup features really speak to me, I don't know why.

Preferably don't even use Reader, but something else like Sumatra. Suddenly you won't even need to upgrade the hardware.

Not even editing them. You can do that without Acrobat. It is very helpful if you are designing forms though.

Is there another program that will let you make form fillable PDFs that you don't have to pay a sub for?

Foxit was good several years ago - no clue about recently

One of my favorite image viewing and correcting softwares is Irfanview. It's not a full blown editor, but it does everything else you could imagine, extremely lightweight and it very very fast! Oh yeah, it's also free.

I've been using this software for many years, and only recently found out you can open PDFs with it. It absolutely blew me away how quickly it did this as well compared to Adobe!

I just renewed my work creative suit license, normally I just blindly click it but this time I checked other plans and there was a “special offer” for the full suit. I saved my company 300 dollars… no one cared. I’m still feeling good about it though.

I honestly don't know why anyone uses Adobe acrobat for anything - reader or the editor. PDF is an open standard.

Plenty of open source software does a decent job of making PDFs - Libre Office for example. And if you have Microsoft Word then you can export documents to PDF without issue; or you can use Print to PDF tools too

Its unlikely any office environment doesnt already have licenses for Microsoft Office so just bin Acrobat and direct people to use office. And if you're not paying for office then why are you paying for Acrobat?

Even if you did edit them, there are better tools than Acrobat.

What is a good alternative for saving fillable form PDFs as a flat file or image? I've been using openoffice libreoffice draw for editing PDFs recently but every method I have come across seems like a workaround rather than a feature, while adobe can do it with a click.

The only thing I use acrobat for is for converting pdf’s to other formats. Why reader can’t do that I don’t know.

What would motivate someone to insist on having software he doesn't use?

@TheWaterGod
The only time I ever use acrobat is when I need to fill in the blanks of a PDF. Mainly because Preview.app on macOS does a terrible job of that

Time to install

Linux!! 🎉

Adobe CS is a rip off. It's bloated like fuck.

PDFSaM (Split and Merge) is a tool I gave staff when they were complaining about editing pdfs. Covers most of the jobs the problem staff want. it also wants to install shit alongside itself. So repackage the installer

I'm a professional, I use professional apps. I don't make the rules!

I actually used to use DC a lot in my previous job (everyone had access), and having full edit functionality would help me in this one too. I've tried other options but I haven't requested a licence because the main thing I do nowadays is merge and split pdfs and there are other options for that. I only miss it occasionally.

🏴‍☠️?

It's upsetting that you have to sell licenses? Granted adobe portal sucks to high hell but I'd rather sell someone crap they don't need because they demanded it rather then not sell anything.