from Hacker News

Ask HN: Why is Adobe the only company capable of editing PDF files?

by sultee on 2/28/23, 10:46 AM with 11 comments

• by gopisuvanam on 2/28/23, 10:52 AM

  PDF was an proprietary format (of Adobe) until 2008. It is no longer the case. Right now there are multiple tools to edit PDF documents online or offline. Check this for example: https://www.pdfescape.com/

• by mtmail on 2/28/23, 10:52 AM

  Plenty of other software can edit PDFs. https://knowtechie.com/firefox-now-lets-you-edit-sign-and-dr... https://www.techradar.com/news/google-chrome-finally-gives-u...

• by taxcoder on 2/28/23, 12:28 PM

  I spend a lot of time in Nitro PDF. The feature set I use is comparable to Adobe. We switched for better price with perpetual license and preferred interface (ribbon vs. whatever Adobe's is called).

  https://www.gonitro.com/

• by gitgud on 2/28/23, 1:27 PM

  Try Inkscape, it does alright at editing PDF's and retaining the exact formatting.

  Adobe does have the smoothest experience though...

  https://inkscape.org/

• by mobilio on 2/28/23, 2:07 PM

  I'm using Foxit PDF Editor:

  https://www.foxit.com/pdf-editor/

• by ss108 on 2/28/23, 1:37 PM

  ? It isn't lol

  Just Googling a bit reveals many options...

• by guimi on 2/28/23, 1:44 PM

  LibreOffice Draw can also edit PDFs.

  https://www.libreoffice.org/

• by giorgioz on 2/28/23, 10:57 AM

  on macOS I like https://pdfexpert.com/ a lot to edit .pdf files.