Which proprietary software do you prefer over their open-source alternatives, and why?

mayflower@lemmy.ml to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 428 points –
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Adobe Acrobat. I have tried at least 5 other PDF readers and editors for windows, and none of them are remotely close. Either they don't have any document editing at all and are just PDF readers, or their editing capabilities are VERY clunky, not feature rich, or just don't work.

I haven't ever found another program that let's me directly edit text in a PDF that already exists.

I don't need to edit PDFs much but when I do it's usually quite important, and Adobe is by far the easiest and quickest to do it in.

I hate that that's the case, because I really don't like Adobe as a company and would rather not have to use their software, but there it is.

I highly recommend pdf-exchange editor. It's not FOSS either, BUT it does offer a perpetual offline license, has a portable version and works even better. They do have a free reader version, so you can try out if you like their UI before you buy the full version.

Bluebeam is the holy grail of PDF editors, I highly suggest "acquiring" it.

I also prefer Acrobat over Linux options. I’ve seen hardline users criticize others for asking for an app that can do multiple things, saying you should use different apps for different purposes. I agree generally, but I really don’t think have a PDF app that can read, rotate, and merge multiple PDFs and photos together to create a PDF is THAT much of an ask.

I also just don't want to have different apps for literally everything I do. That sounds REALLY annoying. Having one application that I use for making, editing, and reading PDFs isn't really asking that much IMO. It's just like asking for an application to read, edit, and make text files. They might notve exactly the same task, but they're certainly related enough that having them all in one place is perfectly reasonable.

I second bluebeam. Used it for work a lot. Especially doing redlines.