Genuine question; what does Acrobat Pro buy you over the free versions and/or OSS competitors?

I uses Apple Preview a lot because it lets me edit and sign documents pretty easily, and that came bundled with my Mac. What does the Acrobat Pro include that isn't in the free stuff?

I’ve been wondering about this too.

In addition to signing documents with Preview, MacOS/Linux/Windows can all print to pdf / pdf/a, and the Notes app on iOS includes a camera-based document scanner that exports to OCR’ed PDF.

I’ve been making PDFs with LaTeX, for decades, but those other tools are more mainstream, and work fine. I can’t imagine why anyone would pay for acrobat these days.

One huge flaw of Apple Preview is that it doesn't handle PDF forms well, as I discovered when trying to print tax returns.

Really? Me and my wife did her immigration paperwork a few years ago with Apple Preview (I think?) to edit the forms.

I'd be curious to hear what Preview messed up?

It looked fine on screen, but only printed the first 4-5 pages properly, then lots of stuff was missing on subsequent pages. After that I couldn't print at all and ended up having to remove/reinstall the printer in OS preferences. This was just a few months ago, OS up to date, unremarkable Canon printer.

None of the free apps I tried can fill out certain forms. The one built into Firefox is pretty good but still a little janky with some fields.

I think the modern ones are all fine for the basic stuff like that.

For my work, it was the highly detailed low level stuff. Pre-flight checks/profiles, content tree (object level, including text fragment) browsing, flattening, converting, transforming versions, and so on. It was indispensable for some of those operations, working in a printing business where clients would sometimes send in their own problematic PDFs which we'd need to adjust or inspect to find the error.

(Favourite one: a font was embedded in a PDF that mapped a character using // in its name, which was "fine" on PDF, but on the printer's RIP was converted to postscript for one step, and // in postscript precedes an immediately evaluated name so it stopped parsing and tried to look for it and bombed out)

There's advanced features that FOSS equivalents dont do quite as well.

I also wish Microsoft would pull its head out of its rear and make a preview clone for windows because that app basically supplants acrobat for basic use.

<sarcasm>Dear lord, did you stop to think of the shareholders before you wrote that screed?!</sarcasm>

SaaS is a virus that has drastically reduced the power of the individual creator for the benefit of people who really don't need more money. I wish there were a viable FLOSS alternative to more of Adobe's CS software.

SaaS itself is fine. A lot of software has recurring costs for the saas company (think clarifai, chatgpt, or circleci)

Subscriptions for software that you run on your own machine is a little much tho.

The word for the activity occurring in your second sentence used to just be called "hosting".

The problem is that there are fewer and fewer pieces of software that aren't hosted somewhere.

Gotcha capitalism with a side of rent-seeking.

If indies need it, then sure, it can be necessary to sustain smaller shops that have to support backend/cloud features and multiple OSes that churn APIs faster than a newspaper.

Isn't the shareholder us?

I recommend a one-time Fox-it PDF pro purchase. While they too are getting into subscriptions they still make a one-time purchase available.

Haven't found any significant deficiencies, nice tool overall.

The only problem is that ADobe is making the adobe engine incompatible with older versions. I've had PDFs that were made less than 10 years ago indesign etc that refused to load in Edge, which is where we work.