I've been using pdfstudio from Qoppa[1] for a while. It's been a good replacement for AcrobatPro for me.

1. https://www.qoppa.com/pdfstudio/

have you looked at foxitPDF ? this is a comparison table from Foxit's site against Acrobat Pro: https://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf-editor/adobe-acrobat-alter...

(not associated with Foxit in any way shape or form nor a user)

Be careful with Foxit software, though. They have a history of doing some very unsavoury things. Their Wikipedia page has some details for those interested.

Do you have a specific link? Their Wikipedia page is pretty short and I don't see anything notable in there.

Ah, my bad. I was reading the page for the company not the product.

I recently switched from Foxit to PDF-XChange and I'm enjoying it so far https://www.tracker-software.com/product/pdf-xchange-editor

Thanks, first time I'd heard of it. Looks a good match.

another one to look at is Nitro as well (just looked for an alternative based on Silhouette's comment below). here's a link to G2 for comparisons: https://www.g2.com/products/foxit-phantompdf/competitors/alt...

Based on your feature request list, all but the form creation (iirc) is handled well by PDF-XChange by Tracker Software. It's a one time purchase + optional maintenance upgrade model.

The OCR is what keeps me in Acrobat camp, too. And very sadly since this company is outright customer-hostile and the software is absurdly expensive.

I've been trying tesseract but find it lacking -- need a better shape/text/picture region recognition (people are working on it these days), and something which puts it back in tagged PDF form. I also want to try whatever Nuance/OmniSoft is selling these days since I used to be a OmniPage customer before.

I'm in the same boat. I keep a virtual machine with an up-to-date Acrobat Pro license just for the OCR. It's not that the OCR is state-of-the-art any more. It's not as accurate as ABBYY in my experience. But it still generates the most predictable, consistent bounding boxes for text selection out of the alternatives that I've tried.

Not sure how ABBYY FineReader is priced these days, but it was always giving me excellent results.

That, and Adobe Lightroom. I tried to switch and had a mixture of Darktable, RawTherapee, RapidPhotoDownloader and digiKam running. It was unpleasant and years behind Lightroom, unfortunately. Even more unfortunate is that I have a stand-alone license for Lightroom 5, but my camera is too new for it (no support for its RAWs).

Darktable has had a major upgrade recently , and at least on Windows, it’s pretty much on par and its GUI has had a major boost in responsiveness.

Thanks for the feedback, I hadn't thought about replacing Lightroom yet.

I do like Lightroom, but the catalogue speed with 100k+ photos is glacial on my PC. I tried importing 30 years of photos rather than having multiple catalogues, as tagging consistently across all would be useful ("Hey auntie Sally, look at the photos of you aging!").

I use Capture One in Lightroom's place and it really is an excellent tool, its raw processing capabilities are fantastic and the features mean I barely (if ever) have to reach for a more-powerful editor like Affinity.

I'm not sure whether it meets your needs, but in architecture and MEP engineering we use Bluebeam Revu almost exclusively. Personally I find its UI very frustrating, though.

What are your must-have features?

Great question :)

1. Impeccable Word to PDF conversion 2. Combining, rearranging pages and documents 3. Editing: add/edit/delete text, images from PDFs 4. Form creation (not something we use now, but plan to) 5. Protect PDFs (as much as you can)

That is the majority of what I can remember using in the last 12 months. I have occasionally used:

6. Compare files 7. Redact - though usually I edit the PDF and delete the text directly 8. OCR 9. Comment. But I HATE the PDF commenting experience, as does everyone in the team when we try and pass comments around.