Genuine question; what does Acrobat Pro buy you over the free versions and/or OSS competitors?
I uses Apple Preview a lot because it lets me edit and sign documents pretty easily, and that came bundled with my Mac. What does the Acrobat Pro include that isn't in the free stuff?
In addition to signing documents with Preview, MacOS/Linux/Windows can all print to pdf / pdf/a, and the Notes app on iOS includes a camera-based document scanner that exports to OCR’ed PDF.
I’ve been making PDFs with LaTeX, for decades, but those other tools are more mainstream, and work fine. I can’t imagine why anyone would pay for acrobat these days.
I think the modern ones are all fine for the basic stuff like that.
For my work, it was the highly detailed low level stuff. Pre-flight checks/profiles, content tree (object level, including text fragment) browsing, flattening, converting, transforming versions, and so on. It was indispensable for some of those operations, working in a printing business where clients would sometimes send in their own problematic PDFs which we'd need to adjust or inspect to find the error.
(Favourite one: a font was embedded in a PDF that mapped a character using // in its name, which was "fine" on PDF, but on the printer's RIP was converted to postscript for one step, and // in postscript precedes an immediately evaluated name so it stopped parsing and tried to look for it and bombed out)
It looked fine on screen, but only printed the first 4-5 pages properly, then lots of stuff was missing on subsequent pages. After that I couldn't print at all and ended up having to remove/reinstall the printer in OS preferences. This was just a few months ago, OS up to date, unremarkable Canon printer.
There's advanced features that FOSS equivalents dont do quite as well.
I also wish Microsoft would pull its head out of its rear and make a preview clone for windows because that app basically supplants acrobat for basic use.
I uses Apple Preview a lot because it lets me edit and sign documents pretty easily, and that came bundled with my Mac. What does the Acrobat Pro include that isn't in the free stuff?