1

Hey guys, I would like to hear what you think about the current Adobe Acrobat alternatives?

Features we need are the standard pdf editing tools (for blueprints, diagrams as well as documents/contracts) as well as electronic signing/signature.

I’m kicking myself for not adding Adobe Standard to all of our Dell PCs for only $35 each when we purchased. I had no idea this software is $250 per person otherwise.

7 Spice ups
2

Foxit Software will be your closest alternative to Acrobat.

4 Spice ups
3

“Standard PDF editing tools” is not specific enough. Specify what you need to do.

Important question: What do you need to do with blueprints? We’re moving to Blubeam Revu and Vu for our users that deal with blueprints. It’s got a lot of powerful markup tools for annotating and comparing multiple documents and makes it much more useful than Acrobat, and it’s cheaper by a little bit. Not $35 cheap, but it’s up to you and what you need. I’d try out Vu (free) and see if it’s up your alley and look into Revu.

1 Spice up
4

cutepdf writer

1 Spice up
5

NItro PDF is good

3 Spice ups
6

We use two software for PDFs

Creating= PDF Redirect (freeware)

http://www.exp-systems.com/

Editing= PDF-Xchange Viewer as it lets you add notes and markings for free.

7

I found nitro to be a better fit here than foxit reader when editing. I do like foxit better for reading.

8

You can also try our new product - ABBYY PDF Transformer+. It has PDF editing and markup tools as well as digital signature.

With PDF editing success somewhat varies from document to document. Some solutions may work better than others on your particular PDF files.

You can download it here: http://trial.abbyyusa.com/download-pdft-plus-preview

9

AbleWord appears to be a freeware PDF-capable editor. At least I was able to load a 5MB PDF (with lots of pictures and complex formatting) into it and edit a few words, then save it. It screwed up some of the formatting on a table-of-contents but for editing simple PDFs it might work fine. Plus the saved PDF bloated to 43 MB.

I also saved the file as a Word .DOC and it expanded to 13 MB. Formatting on the saved version wasn’t perfect but neither was the formatting on a version converted by zamzar.com, and that converted .DOC expanded to 80 MB (!!). From the few pages I looked at, zamzar screwed some things up badly while the AbleWord conversion was much better.