Best alternative to Adobe Acrobat Pro?

by philg

Today has been a momentous day for me. I spent much of the morning watching a backlit LCD television screen anxiously waiting for updates… on the progress of setup of a Dell XPS 13 2-in-1 PC. I will always remember January 20, 2017 as the historic occasion on which I got my first 2-in-1 device.

This does lead to a question… what is a good alternative to Adobe Acrobat Pro? I subscribe to Adobe Creative Cloud, but it works on only two devices and I already have it set up on two desktop computers. The process of an individual adding a third device is simply not contemplated by Adobe (their support folks suggest creating a new email address and then setting up a second Adobe account).

I have never liked the interface of Acrobat Pro anyway. It always seems to take a few extra clicks to find the features that I actually use: OCR, clipping out sections to paste into Word or Google Docs, adding a signature or some other text to an existing PDF.

Is there an alternative to Acrobat Pro that has the above capabilities and can be purchased for a reasonable price, ideally with a more intuitive interface? I’m already paying Adobe about $700/year so I don’t want to go crazy with additional license fees.

10 thoughts on “Best alternative to Adobe Acrobat Pro?”

  2. just noticed that
    ”
    The PDF-XChange Viewer has been discontinued and replaced by the PDF-XChange Editor which is now available including all the features of the Viewer and much, much more. . .”

  3. Do you have more than 2 people trying to use Adobe programs at the same time?

    If not, simply logout of other devices from the device you are wanting to use when CC says you have too many users. No need to create another account unless you have more than 2 users at one time.

    Our household of 2 adults and 2 children has one account. We constantly use CC and have it installed on 2 desktops, and 4 laptops. There is the small annoyance factor of having to login.

    I haven’t found anything as feature rich and easy to use as Acrobat.

  4. Coincidently, I just downloaded the trial version of Acrobat Pro a couple of hours ago.
    It appears like it will cost $15/month to get it for real, since I’m using Macs.
    I’m using it to comment on a draft of someone’s book, so far it’s not been too awful, but that’s after one hour of use.
    The main use case I envision is personal markup of other people’s technical papers, fixing typos and explaining formulas to myself. Any comments or experience on Acrobat Pro or alternatives for something like that would be highly appreciated!

    “I have discovered a truly remarkable proof of this theorem which this margin is too small to contain. “

  5. Marc: Thanks for the suggestion. That would probably work. I didn’t realize that one could just log in/out without everything being deinstalled.

  6. OCR – Evernote
    Annotations – notability on iPad
    Snips and minor cropping and editing – snagit

  10. I discovered recently that Google Docs will happily edit many PDFs directly. I doubt it will do OCR, however.

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