As work toward creating a paperless office, I’m coming to the conclusion that Acrobat is a necessity. Not the free version but the multiple hundreds of dollars standard version. This isn’t a problem for me because my ScanSnap came with Acrobat 7 Standard. I was hoping to find that there was enough capabilities built into OS X or free tools to have something less expensive to recommend.
Here are the things that I can’t find good ways to do outside of Acrobat:
- Rearrange Pages – And Acrobat isn’t great at this, but I can extract, remove, rearrange, or add pages as needed. In 7 it isn’t particularly user friendly, but it is a whole lot easier than any other way I’ve found to handle it.
- Sign Documents – I haven’t found a good solution for digital or graphical signatures.
- Filling in Documents – Acrobat provides a Typewriter tool that basically lets you type anywhere in the document even if it wasn’t saved as a form. (If it was saved as a form you can fill it in using the free version of Acrobat.)
- Compressing PDFs – OS X has a built in process to compress PDFs, but it barely makes any noticeable difference. Acrobat can make a significant change in the size of the file.
- Editing Existing Text – Acrobat will let you edit existing text. So if you find an error in a file that you saved as a PDF, you can just make the change. This only works for small changes like fixing a spelling error. If you try to start removing entire paragraphs it probably won’t look right.
Are there other tools that allow you to do all of this other than Acrobat?
How about Foxit Reader for Windows as a lower cost solution?
We are managing pretty well with two tools, each of which has a slightly different feature set and both of which are much less expensive than Acrobat: PDFPen and PDFClerk.
Here’s a comparison of the two products, which does contain links to both products: http://www.apple.comwww.tuaw.com/2007/03/31/feature-review-pdfclerk-vs-pdfpen/
Hope you find this helpful!
CutePDF works as well and then some and it’s only $49.00
I use PDF995(http://www.software995.com/) which I find very adequate for most of the Acrobat tasks. You will need to download Pdf995,PdfEdit995 and Signature995. Give it a try and see what you think.
-JB
Uf you use a Mac the new version of Preview in Leopard allows for rearranging pages by drag and drop.
I’ve used Acrobat Pro7 for 2 years and it’s a necessity. It shrinks a 4MB Word doc to 100K with little loss. Combining documents from various programs is easy – sorting them is difficult. Have tried v8 and don’t need it. I bought it after trying PDF995 and am glad I have it. My shredder hates me for it though.
These are good arguments in favor of Acrobat – not withstanding the fact that (potentially not as good) alternatives exist, but I think it does point out an assumption that affects even the Internet.
Why use PDF at all? Do you need information (content) to be presented in a particular way in electronic or print? Especially in light of a “paperless” office? I would think that if you can make the move toward a paperless office – which is reducing the presentations, then you could argue for a better separation of content and presentation.
Connecting images to text can be done in numerous formats – HTML, RTF, or any number of word processor or layout software – and digital signatures are often handled by public key systems like PGP or GPG.
I have to admit that I am not in a paperless office – though I wish I were – but I just really cannot see why an office working toward getting away from paper would be worried about paper presentation.
@Mike – As far as I know FoxIt reader will do none of the things I mentioned.
@Sarah – Thanks for the link to PDFpen and PDFClerk. Those are both products I wasn’t familiar with.
@Ben – I had forgotten to try this when I upgraded. So far it seems to work well and is a little simpler to use than Acrobat for those fucntions.
@Glenn – I’m currently using Acrobat 7 and I’ve been fairly happy with it. It is a little slow, but it does the job. I’ve looked at upgrading to Acrobat 8, but haven’t been able to justify it yet.
@David – If we were in a paperless world, then PDF wouldn’t be so important. However, when you are trying to interface your office with the rest of the world that uses paper, you sometimes need a way to keep images of documents. Ideally you need a way to keep an image AND the text of a document. That way you can search the text, but if the OCR didn’t capture 100% of the document, you can always view it as an image.
For example, when I get a copy of a bill that I need to keep for tax records, I scan it in as a PDF and perform OCR on it. The OCR lets me do a search for it in the future. However, if I ever need to show the bill to the IRS, I can easily print it out and give them an exact copy of the document.
Mark – when it comes to capturing documents from other sources outside the office, is PDF the best format for the image to be scanned in? (I assume you would not try to edit a document in such a case, and I don’t think even Acrobat would let you) I don’t know, as I have never worked in this format, but are there other image formats which would a) not be “lossy” (like JPGs are) and b) would still have decent compression – maybe PNG? How do these compare in file size (hard drive space is my own particular concern, even in the world of ever cheaper storage.
@David – There may be other formats that have smaller file size. I don’t think it is significant, but a PNG of a plain B&W document may be smaller than a PDF with an image and text layer.
Personally hard drive conservation is at the lower end of my list of priorities. Very high on my list of priorities is the ability to locate documents.
If you store a document as a PNG, JPEG, TIF or any image type, you cannot search for the contents of that document. So if I save a contract as a TIF and then later search for a company mentioned in that contract, I won’t be able to find it (unless the company name is in the file name).
If I store a document as plain text and do a search (using Spotlight, DEVONThink, Google Desktop, etc.) I can find the file. However since it is just text, it won’t have the signatures or any markup so I would have a difficult time proving that the document is indeed the one signed by a client.
PDF gives you both capabilities. The image of the page is stored along with the text. That means it shows up when I do a search AND I can see the exact document. That way I can locate handwritten notes in the margin or stylized fonts that can’t be recognized by OCR.
If your PDF doesn’t come from a scanned source, it can be very small because the image layer isn’t required.
There are several different types of compression formats within PDF. If you are using decent compression, I don’ think it will be any bigger than keeping an image file and text file of the information. Even if it was a little bigger, the inconvenience of trying to keep two separate files is likely to cost hundreds of times more than the cost of additional storage.
Thanks for the explanation.
@David – No problem. I’ve discovered that there is quite a bit more to Acrobat than I originally realized. It will let you embed videos, run javascript, send forms to a server, and a bunch of other functions that I didn’t realize until recently.
Hi Mark
I just got myself a Scan Snap 510M and I am now pursuing a goal of becoming “Paperless” in a few months. Attached with the scanner came Acrobat Pro ver 8. I find this program heavy and slow as compared to Preview. Do you think I still can use Preview to read (not to make PDF) If so how?
Thanks for your help
Claude
I’m not Mark, but I can tell you that you can use any appropriate program (Preview, Acrobat, PDFPen, PDFClerk) to open pdf files even if you have all of them installed. Just “right click” (however you choose to do that, I use the double finger click on the touchpad on my laptop so I always forget which keys to use on the keyboard) on the file to “open with” and select the application you prefer. I’m sure there’s a default setting you can set, too.
Hope that helps, or were you asking something more complicated than that?
@Claude – For viewing files, I’d use Preview. If you need to edit them, Acrobat 8 is going to be your best bet. Acrobat 8 will let you do things like OCR and sign documents–features preview lacks.
If you want to make it so clicking on a file opens it in Preview instead of Acrobat, follow Sarah’s instructions. If you want to make it where all PDFs open with Preview, select a PDF file and push Apple + i. This will bring up a menu where you can change what opens that file. There is a check box that will allow you to push the change out to all files of the same type.
Hope that helps!
Hey, Thanks Sarah and Mark for this quick response. When I installed Acrobat I was asked if I wanted this program to be the default reader and I answered yes. I find the program (Acrobat) slow to open. Now it opens automatically whenever I get a pfd file. I’d like to revert back to Preview for that function.
Thanks a zillion. I will do what both of you are suggesting
Claude
I use NitroPDF and it is as good as Acrobat which I have used before but at a fraction of its price. It can do pretty much every thing Acrobat can do though the interface is a little different. If you are lucky you might find this software on eBay for about $25 !.
SamK