HACKER Q&A
📣 sultee

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


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?

  👤 gopisuvanam Accepted Answer ✓
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/
👤 mtmail
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...
👤 taxcoder
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/

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

Adobe does have the smoothest experience though...

https://inkscape.org/

👤 mobilio
I'm using Foxit PDF Editor:

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

👤 ss108
? It isn't lol

Just Googling a bit reveals many options...

👤 guimi
LibreOffice Draw can also edit PDFs.

https://www.libreoffice.org/

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