An app to rival Acrobat?

[N0rTH3rnNUT 0]

Hi all, new to this forum and Affinity products so apologies if this has been asked already.

I was wondering if there are any intentions to create an application that can handle and edit PDF's along the lines that Adobe Acrobat can.

 

 

[Fixx 587]

Note that Acrobat can do about a million things and few of them elegantly. I do not think another such multitoolbox is needed. Rather specified tools.

[Medical Officer Bones 286]

If you are on Windows, the best alternative for PDF editing and creating forms that I have found is PDF Exchange Editor, which does almost everything Acrobat Professional does at a very low price. Even interactive forms with javascript are possible. Prepress flight checking is not included, though.

It also presents the user with a much more focused GUI than Acrobat (which is a confused over-designed mess in Acrobat).

[Alfred 4,492]

1 hour ago, Medical Officer Bones said:

If you are on Windows, the best alternative for PDF editing and creating forms that I have found is PDF Exchange Editor

Even the free version of PDF-XChange Editor is pretty capable, but the paid-for version has some useful extra features.

[Medical Officer Bones 286]

I agree. I used the free version until a couple of months ago, when I needed to create PDF forms for a client. Until two years ago, I used Acrobat Pro for this, but no longer had access to that version, and the rental only Acrobat DC is just ridiculously over-priced.

[N0rTH3rnNUT 0]

Any recommendations for a Mac based PDF reader/editor. The one thing I've found missing on the ones I've tried is a way to view colour separations.

[MikeW 1,759]

1 hour ago, N0rTH3rnNUT said:

Any recommendations for a Mac based PDF reader/editor. The one thing I've found missing on the ones I've tried is a way to view colour separations.

callas pdfToolbox is the only other pdf application that can do separation preview and is color managed. callas is who licenses to Adobe much of what Acrobat does. The one thing it doesn't do is edit text in a pdf.

[N0rTH3rnNUT 0]

Thanks for this, I downloaded the trial version and it does look good.