Agreed… PhantomPDF is likely a better PDF editor than Adobe Pro, and at a fraction of the cost. It is getting more and more difficult to purchase Acrobat Pro outright; they tend to want a monthly or annual subscription anymore.
I’m (still!) using an old version of Adobe 9 Pro that I got perhaps 10 years or more ago. Works fine, does what I want, costs nothing. Elegant? Nope. Functional? Totally.
I have used the new version(s) and find absolutely nothing to recommend them.
Agreed. Switched computers and could not get the Adobe 8 Pro to be licensed on the new computer. Even my tech support were unable to help. I am making the new version work but it’s not pretty.
Unless you’re dead set on being able to use Acrobat add-ons like Tic-Tie-Calc, there are a number of pdf editor software options. One thing I have always looked for is the ability to annotate and having customizable stamps.
Foxit and Nitro (I have used both and currently use FoxIt) are great substitutes for Acrobat and as functional. Foxit does have a free version that does offer a lot of document markup options but you will need the full version if you want to combine working paper documents or create your own stamps, fillable forms, etc. Another is PDFelement which seems to have similar functionality.
Personally speaking, I avoid the available online editors and wouldn’t suggest any of the editors that are available in the <$100 range. Most simply don’t have all the functions you’ll want and will outgrow it quickly.
We used to use Adobe 9. Now we have switched all computers to PDF-Xchange Pro. We can do everything we could do in Adobe 9, move or copy files or pages between open PDF files, crop pages, duplicate pages, etc. https://www.tracker-software.com/product/pdf-xchange-pro
They also have a very good pdf printer. You can add the current print job to the beginning or end of an existing pdf file. And it’s headquarters are in Canada. Buy CANADIAN!
How do you do this? I only see DoxCycle PDF as a printer option within TaxCycle? (Not available for printing, say from Excel or Word as an installed option.)
Print to your Microsoft PDF printer, then open in Doxcycle - you can set up a folder in Doxcycle, that Doxcycle will monitor. Then if you print to that folder, it eases the import into the Doxcycle file.
I’m using Acrobat Standard DC obtained with a Dell computer purchase in Nov 2016. Paid $99 for the license. It still gets automatic updates from Adobe, but I never have to pay anything, as long as I don’t sign up for the online stuff (Adobe Creative Cloud or something?). And, the license seems to work on multiple computers. Last I checked, Dell still had that option to purchase Acrobat with a computer. When I looked at buying Nitro or Nuance products, they seemed to be MUCH more expensive.
Been using Foxit Phamtom PDF for about a month now and I love it. Actually found that for certain task, like merging two PDF documents, it’s better designed than Adobe Pro DC (which we were using for the last three years). No downside so far.
And worth mentioning, we bought the perpetual license but, for a modest extra annual fee (about $35 per license per year), we can get all the future updates. So way cheaper than their subscription model and a fraction of Adobe Pro DC.
I tried out Foxit a couple of years ago. It was ok and simple to use, in some cases simpler than Adobe Pro DC (which I continue to use). I just found that when I needed to actually edit a pdf document
(which admittedly is rare) nothing compared to Adobe. The integrity of the document was not maintained to the standard I expected. That is the primary reason I continue to use Adobe, and begrudgingly pay the higher price.
Editing software was something we were comparing as well and found it was subtantially the same. Our needs are pretty basic: editing minor typos, updating the date on a letter or fax cover sort of things. We found that Foxit meets our needs. The OCR is consistently accurate, and the automatic font is always a perfect match (even for fancy or unusual fonts). I would add that the comment functions (highlight, notes, shapes, etc.) also work as well as Adobe.
A few areas where I like Foxit better than Adobe:
a) Organizing documents (moving pages, extracting pages, merging PDF, and such) has not only the same great drag and drop functionality as Adobe, but it’s also done from the sidebar, which means you can still see the full size pages in the main window. In Adobe, going to the Organize menu made all the pages into thumbnails and would sometimes make it challenging to reorder pages if they all looked very similar at 10% or 20%.
b) Electronic signature are where a client signs on a tablet directly in the PDF instead of on a printed page, as opposed to a digital signature where the signature is usually done via email and a whole digital certificate gets attached to the PDF). I sign most of our firm’s letters and forms using electronic signature. In Foxit, electronic signature get actually embedded in the document with Foxit, whereas they could be moved around and copied after the fact in Adobe unless you took the extra step to flatten the document.
I have used Fox it Phantom for tax season, I paid monthly just for the 3 months I needed it and went back to the free version for the rest of the year. The only thing I have found with the free version is that sometimes some of the forms are missing parts when printed out.
I have been using Nuance Paperport for years now and it does the basics pretty well.
