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this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2024
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AssholeDesign
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This is a community for designs specifically crafted to make the experience worse for the user. This can be due to greed, apathy, laziness or just downright scumbaggery.
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Wow, I had no idea Acrobat Reader still exists. They charge €15,72 per month now apparently.
Reader has always been free. This is for Pro which allows you to do manipulation of PDFs, not just viewing them.
I vaguely remember (but can't find it right now) that the PDF format became open source at some point and free alternatives came out for PDF editing. And that was already back in the 2000s when people still printed documents (which is what PDF was originally meant for).
In modern times, every browser/OS can read PDF, every text editor can export to PDF, nobody prints physical documents and there are free alternatives – so why do they still exist and who is paying?
If you have a business like a law firm where it is VERY IMPORTANT that a PDF has certain qualities, free tools for PDF creation can be a big gamble, especially if you have to open a PDF that someone else has created and do changes to it. And the cost is pretty trivial compared to the cost of messing up.
I just open pdfs in the (firefox) browser. Does most of what I need.
My company pays for it so we can edit pdf forms.
Sadly not many capable tools for that exist. Open for suggestions (Windows) though
For a professional, what Acrobat pro can do is not available in any other program and (don't tell Adobe!) only 50 cents a day is an incredible deal
For example you can scan a sheet of paper, it does OCR on it and creates a font that matches exactly the one on page, then you can change words and sentences without changing the look of it.
Trim pages, remove elements, edit embedded images and vectors with other programs (doesn't need to be made by Adobe but it works better if it is). Change margins, fonts, colors, flow text differently, change the line spacing. Have a preview how color will change when printed, see if spot colors are used and change them in different ways. Edit transparencies, use plugins for extended repetitive work. Convert the fonts to outlines if the font has some kind of DRM and doesn't allow embedding, resulting in visual difference between other computers.
The nerfed standard edition at 10 euro per month instead isn't worth anything