Ask HN: Why is Adobe the only company capable of editing PDF files?

16 points·sultee··11 comments

What's so non-trivial in this process that the only option to edit text on a PDF file is to buy an Adobe Acrobat subscription? Why can't other software do the same?

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PDF was an proprietary format (of Adobe) until 2008. It is no longer the case. Right now there are multiple tools to edit PDF documents online or offline. Check this for example: https://www.pdfescape.com/

Plenty of other software can edit PDFs. https://knowtechie.com/firefox-now-lets-you-edit-sign-and-dr... https://www.techradar.com/news/google-chrome-finally-gives-u...

I spend a lot of time in Nitro PDF. The feature set I use is comparable to Adobe. We switched for better price with perpetual license and preferred interface (ribbon vs. whatever Adobe's is called).

https://www.gonitro.com/

Wow. Ribbon and preferred interface in the same sentence.

By the way, NitroPDF is great.

Worked at nitro. Looking like MS office with the ribbon gui sold a lot of licenses. Users don’t want to learn Adobe’s ui.

We spend our days in a Microsoft world, the ribbon is familiar. I'd be happy if it was more keyboard driven but most others would complain.

Try Inkscape, it does alright at editing PDF's and retaining the exact formatting.

Adobe does have the smoothest experience though...

https://inkscape.org/

I'm using Foxit PDF Editor:

https://www.foxit.com/pdf-editor/

? It isn't lol

Just Googling a bit reveals many options...

LibreOffice Draw can also edit PDFs.

https://www.libreoffice.org/

on macOS I like https://pdfexpert.com/ a lot to edit .pdf files.

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