Adobe Acrobat
Pros
Cons
- Fine-tunes PDFs for specific printing and display
- Vast range of customization features for high-end printing
- Secure cloud-based service for collaboration and digital signing Unique font-matching technology for editing scanned images
- Supports signature collection from other users.
- Experimental AI feature is almost useless
- Can't split scanned two-page spreads
- Limits on moving contents between pages when editing
- Paid subscriptions are expensive and don’t offer one-time purchase options.
In the realm of digital files, Adobe’s PDF reigns supreme as the universal format for exchanging formatted documents across any operating system. Introduced by Adobe in 1993, the Portable Document Format (PDF) and the Acrobat app have long dominated the field of PDF viewing and management. For graphics professionals, Acrobat remains the top choice due to its seamless integration with Adobe’s leading graphics applications like Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. While rival programs, such as our Editors’ Choice for optical character recognition (OCR), ABBYY FineReader Pro, offer some features that Acrobat lacks, Adobe Acrobat continues to be a powerhouse for corporate, small-business, legal, and academic users, maintaining its status as an Editors’ Choice award winner.
What Is Adobe Acrobat?
You can run Adobe Acrobat on virtually any platform. This subscription-based app is available on Windows and macOS desktops and laptops, Android and iOS phones and tablets, and even in web browsers via a web-based version. Each platform receives continuous updates, though interface updates may roll out at different times. However, many recent updates from Adobe focus on flashy, high-tech features rather than addressing long-standing limitations in the core functions of editing and managing PDF files (more on these limitations later).
What's new in Acrobat?
- Request e-signature after adding text
You can now request e-signatures after adding text or using any fill-and-sign tool. Once you select any tool in the fill or sign tools group, you’ll see a prompt to Request e-signatures. Selecting Request e-signatures will open the Request Signatures dialog box to help you prepare your document to share for e-signatures.
Invite others to sign using quick tools
You can now invite others to sign your document using the quick tools in Acrobat.
- To invite others to sign, Select > Invite others to sign.
Edit images in Acrobat quickly
You can now easily edit images in your document using the edit image options in Acrobat. With this release, Acrobat has increased the number of edit image options:
- In-place tool palette – Select the image you want to edit, and the
- in-place tool palette will appear. Select the Edit image option
- Edit toolbar in the left pane – Select the image you want to edit, and go to the edit toolbar in the left pane. Select the Edit image option.
- Right-click menu – Right-click the image to open the right-click menu. Select Edit.
How Much Does Adobe Acrobat Cost?
Acrobat isn’t cheap, even without the AI add-on. Adobe Acrobat Pro costs $19.99 per month with a one-year commitment or a more economical $239.88 annually if paid upfront. For a month-to-month subscription with no commitment, Acrobat Pro costs $29.99 per month.
For Windows users, there’s a more affordable option: Acrobat Standard. It costs $12.99 monthly with a one-year commitment, $22.99 monthly without a commitment, or $155.88 for a full year if paid upfront. However, compared to Pro, it lacks features like document comparison, redaction, and built-in OCR for converting scanned PDFs into editable documents.
As a software reviewer, I receive free review copies of many apps, but Adobe Acrobat Pro is one of the few I pay for year after year—even though I sometimes use other programs for features Acrobat lacks. For those who prefer not to subscribe, older versions with permanent licenses are available: Acrobat Pro 2020 for $538.80 and Acrobat Standard 2020 for $358.80.
The free version, Acrobat Reader, is available for Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android. It allows you to add comments to PDFs, similar to the paid versions, but does not support content editing. Your Acrobat account lets you use the software on two desktop or laptop devices, regardless of operating system. If you try to launch Acrobat on a third device, you’ll be prompted to log out of one of the other two.
Why Pay for Adobe Acrobat?
Why should you pay for a PDF app when modern operating systems include built-in PDF viewing and markup tools? Windows users can utilize the Microsoft Edge browser, and Mac users have Preview, both of which allow for basic annotations like drawing arrows, adding text notes, and circling content.
A commercial app like Acrobat Pro, however, offers advanced features such as OCR to convert scanned documents into searchable PDFs, redaction tools, editing capabilities for fixing typos and replacing images, file comparison to identify differences between document versions, and PDF-signing functionalities. Additionally, Acrobat Pro allows you to store documents in Adobe’s proprietary cloud storage, enabling access from Adobe’s mobile apps for advanced signing and editing functions.
Viewing and Editing PDFs
When viewing a PDF, Acrobat allows you to split the window horizontally so that one part of the file appears in the top pane and another part in the lower pane. Additionally, Acrobat features a unique Spreadsheet Split function, akin to a spreadsheet’s “freeze panes,” which keeps the top row and left column visible while you scroll through the rest. This feature is particularly useful for viewing PDFs created from spreadsheets, but it can also be helpful for keeping a map legend visible while exploring the rest of the map.
Acrobat also offers a Reading view that hides most of the interface, although it lacks a view that displays only the unformatted text of a PDF, a feature found in Foxit PDF Editor Suite Pro. Like other PDF apps, Acrobat allows you to drag and drop pages to reorder them and insert pages from other files and formats. For example, you can drag a Word document into the thumbnail images of an existing PDF, and Acrobat will convert it into PDF format and insert it into the existing PDF pages.
Editing text in a scanned image is one of the most technically challenging tasks for a PDF editor. Acrobat excels in this area by running optical character recognition (OCR) on the image and allowing you to insert, change, or remove the recognized text. Uniquely, Acrobat can create a custom font from the scanned text, enabling you to edit the document in the same font used in the original, even if that font has been obsolete for a century or more. This process works best when OCR is performed on a large enough section of text for Acrobat to gather all the letters needed for the font, and while the results aren’t always perfect, no other PDF app offers this capability.
