It seriously sucks when your company mixes thousands of PDFs and faxes. Yeah faxes. Yay medical data “security”.
We provide Adobe tools for a significant subset of the staff ($$$$) and I think three random free/shareware tools of varying “trustworthiness” just to convert or often just *compress* the horrid inline image attachments customers and vendors send to us, which isn’t a forms issue, but a “using PDF as an awful image wrapper” issue — and it’s way worse than the forms bugs.
I can’t think of a software vendor we get less from for the price than Adobe really. Especially Acrobat and PDF tools.
The creatives love the cloud stuff for photoshop and that suite, but we’ve had strange problems with saving from those to bog standard windows file shares and Adobe literally says “not supported” via official paid support channels.
I do my best to socially distance myself from any Adobe related tickets since our desktop guy and even my boss have dealt more with them and I can 90% of the time. LOL
Everything Adobe makes has a competing product that is superior and almost always much less expensive. That they're still in business is mainly a matter of inertia: People don't want to have to learn a new piece of software to do the same thing -- especially when someone else is paying the bills every month, forever.
I swore off Adobe years ago when they did away with outright purchases. They still send me postal mail (apparently, they can't send email to an address associated with a canceled account) offering me steep first-year discounts to re-enroll in their
ransom subscription program, but I'm not biting. Every successive version of their software is buggier and more bloated than the versions they replaced, so I'd wind up paying forever for old software. No thanks. I want no part of that racket.
In a way, however, I'm grateful to Adobe for forcing me to explore alternatives that turned out to be better and leaner than anything Adobe has made in the past 10 years. That in turn gave me a peculiar kind of competency in the basics of practically any program designed to do the things I need to do, and advanced competency in the ones I decided I liked best.
For example, to replace Premiere Pro, I eventually decided on Magix Video Pro X because it has all of the capabilities I need and fits my workflow best. But in the course of my search, I also acquired basic competency in Vegas Pro, Davinci Resolve, Lightworks, Edius Pro, and several other lesser-known commercial editors, as well as many FOSS ones. I chose the one that best fit my workflow to become expert in; but if I had to, I could edit a video in any of them.
The same goes for my Dreamweaver replacement. I tried practically every IDE out there, and I can use any of them if I have to. The one I chose to become expert in was Blumentals WeBuilder because it just "felt" right to me; but I can use Eclipse, Netbeans, Notepad++, or probably whatever else is out there, because chances are I tried it.
Serif Affinity Photo aptly replaces Photoshop, as well as those parts of Fireworks that I actually used. Affinity Designer replaces Adobe Illustrator, and Affinity Publisher replaces Adobe InDesign. All of them are outright purchases with no ransom.
As for PDF files, all you have to do is flatten them to make them universally readable. Almost any PDF application I've ever tried has the ability to save a "flattened PDF" in some manner or another. Some actually have that function in the File menu. In those that don't, you just print the PDF to a PDF.
Rich
