Alternatives to Adobe Acrobat

June 18, 2003

Alternatives to Adobe Acrobat

Portable Document Format (PDF) is an increasingly popular standard for e-books (and hundreds of other uses) because of:
1) how well it preserves formatting across many platforms
2) and the security options it provides

The most robust tool for creating PDFs is Adobe Acrobat. It is what I use. For cheaper alternatives, try Adobe's online convertor or pdfFactory. Both let you try before you buy.

There are other options, even free ones. But before committing to a cheaper product, find out what formats they convert from (one popular convertor ONLY works with text files) and whether they can make URLs clickable (many do not.) For a nearly complete listing of PDF conversion utilities, visit Planet PDF Tools List.

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More Posts Like This One: eBook Publishing

Posted by Barbara J. Feldman at June 18, 2003 9:28 AM | Comments (7)

Read Comments

IG
April 15, 2009 1:07 PM

Loks like a consumer product. I called to the Customer Service and requested an evaluation copy. To my surprise I was told that there is no evaluation available and I have to buy the product. Also the Rep confirmed that this was not desiged for the corporate or enterprise usage.

Bloatware
February 18, 2009 7:11 PM

I agree with the above. When I first encountered Acrobat reader, I just thought "what is this rubbish?". A massive bloatware programme that takes several seconds to load, just in order to show you some text. It a laughable piece of software and doesn't work properly. Take fonts for example. If I create a PDF using a specific font that a recipient doesn't have on his or her machine, then there is a tick-box available to embed the font in the PDF document. But it never works.

Adobe Acrobat is rubbish. I welcome any replacement!

Richard from Nitro PDF Software
January 31, 2008 3:29 PM

Hi Barbara, you might like to try our alternative to Acrobat. It does PDF creation, editing, viewing, etc.

Best of luck!

Richard

Bill
September 26, 2006 8:05 AM

For those who hate Adobe Acrobat (that includes me and probably 90% of the planet) and who do not want to pay out any more cash than is absolutely neccessary (also includes me and about 90% of the planet)- try the OpenOffice suite available free from their website at www.openoffice.org. It creates PDF's from Word documents at the click a button. You can even create the document in Word, if you must. Simply open the document with OpenOffice.org Writer and click the PDF button. Easy!!! and its free (and it works fast - and unlike Acrobat it actually does work). It even preserves the clickability of URLs. What's more - you can even eventually dispense with that other piece of trash - Microsoft Office! I hope you do realise this piece of crucial information could save the entire planet. The number of hours spent on PCs could be drastically reduced. We could all leave work 2 hours early, miss the rush hour, save gallons of gas and therefore prevent global warming.

fa-q_acrobat
May 4, 2004 5:17 AM

may the lord reign heavy blows to all those who helped adobe propagate this wretched program called acrobat.
i can't begin to tell you how much i hate it!