It's scary how such a widely used format (PDF) is almost in full control by Adobe. I have yet to see a true competitor to Adobe Acrobat. The only one that has come really close is the one that comes built-in for macOS. It's a hidden gem.
There's a reason why, unlike raster image formats, there aren't any serious competitors. The thing to realise about printed page file formats is that even if you set aside all of the silly "multimedia" and "interactivity" features, there's still a gargantuan rabbit hole of non-trivial features that need to be implemented absolutely perfectly, from kerning to spot color. PDF does it all very well. There's really no scope for a competitor to come along to make something that's obviously better.
Yes, the United States Library of Congress makes heavy use. I imagine their evaluation process to select a digital archive format is very tough!
Yes. The first sentence of the Wikipedia article about PDF is:
>Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems.
And the last sentence of the first paragraph of the same article is:
>PDF was standardized as ISO 32000 in 2008.[5] The last edition as ISO 32000-2:2020 was published in December 2020. .
> Adobe acrobat (and maybe reader) is really the only app that fully supports the full PDF spec
The full spec is large and afaik has many obscure pieces, including 3-D, etc. Like many specs, they don't match reality and nobody takes completeness too seriously. For almost all users, supporting the entire PDF spec doesn't matter (does it matter for any user - does any person or organization use the entire spec over their lifetimes?).
Also, do we know that Adobe supports the entire spec?
There's a fairly big chunk in the spec of special presentation attributes for slideshows. When I implemented them I was surprised that slide shows produced by Acrobat didn't work. Well, obviously my implementation was buggy.
Er, no, Adobe didn't use their own slide show attributes for the slide shows produced by Acrobat. They used JavaScript instead.
Oh well. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Adobe Acrobat is the only thing that can handle all cases yes. All other programs uses (different) special cases each and most of them fail in some edge cases. It can be funny letters showing up because of fonts not working properly or images disapearing or all sorts of things. I have given up to fix them all. I still have a library of PDF's that we used to run through to try to get as many as possible to work.
That's because PDF is well designed and has a fallback for advanced page elements so more primitive readers can still render them.
https://pdfa.org/resource/pdf-in-manufacturing/ is a great usecase.
I recently had to add an embed feature to our pdf rendering, to allow users to embed other pdfs inside the one we generate for them. Since we use headless Chrome, I used pdfjs from mozilla to render the embedded pdf on screen before generating the pdf, so you can actually see and read the embedded pdf.
Works pretty well, but was wondering about this attachment feature of pdfs.
Since these pdfs end up in whatever and how old devices, I'd rather not risk it though.
Edit: Apparently some people can edit PDFs reliably with MacOS Preview.app, LibreOffice Draw or pdftk.
- OpenXPS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_XML_Paper_Specification)
- EPS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encapsulated_PostScript).
*To get reimburses from a union or something.
In regards to Preview, I still find it insane that it doesn't have an iOS/iPadOS equivalent. Bits of the functionality are scattered all over the place, usually in ways that don't feel as good as they do on the Mac. Sometimes I just want to open a PDF and leave it open, and not have to do it from Files which assumes I want to do something else with it than just looking.
But for a lightweight, bloat-free experience, SumatraPDF is the way to go.
Where is all this stuff coming from? Why would you say Preview is the best? Foxit? Nitro? Their are endless PDF applications much more powerful and capable, some designed for professionals.
I think many people find that Preview.app does everything they ever wanted to do with PDFs. It really is surprisingly capable. It's also fast and far less convoluted than most PDF tools I have seen.
And of course it comes free with every Mac, which often makes it "best" in terms of value for money.
It doesn't help that many PDF editors (including the two you mentioned) are full of the most ridiculous pricing shenanigans.
What shenanigans? On one computer, we have a 15 year old version of Foxit running as good as new, no further licensing needed.
I see that much more with Adobe than with anyone, fwiw.
https://www.foxit.com/pdf-editor/
The one-time license option is hidden away in a product comparison table (and linked to in a few other far less visible places).
Nitro, the other PDF editor you mentioned, appears to offer only a one-off purchase:
https://www.gonitro.com/pricing
But it says "for Windows" and at the top of the page, there's a promotion saying "Get up to 1 year subscription - free when you switch to Nitro". So there is a subscription after all?
If you keep scrolling down to the FAQ and there's a question asking:
"Is Nitro available as a subscription or a one-time purchase?
Nitro Pro, ideal for individuals and small to medium sized teams, is available as an annual subscription."
No mention of a one-time purchase option. So which is it? I'm confused. Is this "one-time purchase" a perpetual license or does it stop working after a year?
These are certainly not the most egregious examples of pricing shenanigans. But given the recent history of companies going subscription-only, this is enough uncertainty for me not to buy.
It’s local only (the document you load and data you fill in never leave the browser) and free
Disclosure: I’m the developer behind it
For other colors, it’s in the backlog!
(I’d aiming to automatically provide the correct color by inspecting pixels within the area to redact, to make it as simple as possible)
And OS X and its successors use Display PDF natively, which is why it is trivial to save almost anything that can be displayed into a PDF file. The PDF stack that Preview.app leverages is a foundation of the OS itself.