Adobe Acrobat Pro DC, the gold standard among high-end PDF apps, recently received its most significant upgrade in years, and it brings to PDF editing many of the collaborative conveniences that Microsoft Office, Google Docs, and Apple's iWork suite brought years ago to word processors and spreadsheets.
With either an Acrobat-only subscription or a full Creative Cloud suite subscription, whole teams can now comment on a shared PDF file using an Acrobat desktop app, a mobile app, or by logging into Adobe Document Cloud from any web browser.
Acrobat Pro isn't cheap at $14.99 per month, which equates to $179 per year, but it's uniquely rich in features.
You can get most of the Pro version's features in a cheaper Acrobat Standard version, but the Pro version has features that I wouldn't want to be without, including the ability to find differences between two copies of the same PDF file.
That feature lets me use a tablet-based version of the app for PDF editing, scan an image from my phone into a polished-up PDF, or adjust PDFs so that they meet international standards for data-preservation.
The traditional desktop app looks mostly the same as earlier versions, with a cleaner-looking and more easily navigated design.
It slots in new features that allow searching across multiple PDFs and improves access to files on cloud services like Google Drive.
You'll know you're running the current version when you see a new bright red-and-white icon on your PDF files.
Adobe created the PDF format—and later released the PDF specification as a public standard for anyone to work with.
Acrobat has always set the standard for other PDF tools and it's still the best general-purpose PDF editor, but that doesn't mean it's the best for every purpose.
New Features
I use both Acrobat and the equally excellent ABBYY FineReader .I rely on Acrobat's unique sharing and mobile features, and its longstanding feature that embeds an index in a PDF for superfast text searches, but I also rely on FineReader's unique proofreading features for correcting the text of scanned-in documents, its unique flexibility in editing multipage PDFs, and its unique ability to compare two documents in different formats, such as Word documents and PDFs.
Acrobat's new sharing features make it the clear favorite for many corporate uses, but it's far from being the only choice.
We'll be surveying other Acrobat alternatives in the near future.
The new Acrobat desktop app streamlines Adobe's methods for signing and circulating a PDF.
A new Adobe Sign tool in Acrobat's toolbar makes it easy to upload documents and send out invitations for a signature.
Recipients sign the document by opening it via Adobe's cloud services, and they don't need an Adobe account for signing.
The cloud service embeds the signed PDF with a certificate, so that any modification to the document after it's signed triggers a warning that the document has been altered.
All this was possible in earlier versions, but the new version lets you glance the Home screen in Acrobat to track the status of a document, send reminders, and use other signature-related features.
The Adobe Acrobat Pro DC Experience
Over the years, Acrobat has added so many features that it's easy to forget that some of them exist.
One Acrobat feature found nowhere else is its ability to create a type font from the font in a scanned-in document, and use that font when you add or revise text in the PDF.
So you can scan in a document printed with a font that hasn't been used in a hundred years, then use Acrobat's OCR to make the text searchable and selectable, and then type in changes and corrections to the document's text—with Acrobat automatically using a custom font that it created from the scanned-in font.
Acrobat even offers presentation-style animated transitions from one PDF page to the next.
Acrobat continues to use its familiar interface, with a left-hand sidebar that can display page thumbnails, bookmarks, and attachments.
You right-click on the page thumbnails to manage features like page numbering, so you can make the page numbering of the PDF match the page numbering of a scanned document, with (for example) the opening pages numbered with Roman numerals, and the rest with Arabic numerals.
Or, if you've scanned in pages 25 through 45 of a document, you can make the page numbers on Acrobat's menu also show 25 through 45 instead of starting from 1.
This feature is easier to manage in Acrobat than in any other PDF software I've tried.
If you share PDF files, or if you upload them to Adobe's Document Cloud for access on multiple devices, you can access those files from the Document Cloud web interface at documentcloud.adobe.com.
The main screen has a row of tools at the top for uploading, creating, combining, and otherwise managing PDFs.
You can also export PDFs in Office and other formats, reorder pages in a PDF by dragging thumbnails to different positions, and more.
All these tools closely resemble the ones in the Acrobat desktop and mobile apps, but the desktop Acrobat has a much larger range of tools and options, including redaction, optimizing, and indexing tools.
All these tools are easy to reach from the newly improved Home screen in the new Acrobat version.
That Home screen has separate displays of recent files and scans created by the Adobe Scan mobile app.
It also offers quick access to files on your computer, in Adobe's Document Cloud, and in other cloud-based services, including Box, Dropbox, OneDrive, SharePoint sites, and (newly available in this version) Google Drive.
Notably missing is Apple's iCloud Drive, though you can always access iCloud-based files through the My Computer tab.
A second set of tabs leads to shared PDFs, one tab for files that you've sent or received for viewing, another tab with files for commenting and reviewing, and a third for files that you've been asked to sign or asked others to sign.
The whole arrangement is easy to navigate and visually attractive.
In earlier Acrobat versions, you had to go to a Tools tab to find scan-enhancing tools.
The new version has a vertical toolbar at the right edge of the window, giving quick access to commonly used tools, including Adobe's well-designed interface for combining multiple files into a single PDF.
You can drag documents and images into a single window to combine files, rearrange their order by dragging thumbnail images, and click the Combine button to create a single PDF.
PDF Editing
Acrobat's PDF editing features have always been strong, with unique features built on Adobe's type expertise.
When you're editing text in a PDF, for example, Acrobat lets you fine-tune the spacing between words and between letters, making it possible to add or remove words with minimal disruption to the appearance of the page.
Acrobat includes an impressive range of powerful security and privacy options, but we discovered a bug in the latest desktop Acrobat versions that's a potential security flaw.
When you create a PDF or open an existing one, Acrobat creates a thumbnail image of the first page, approximately 150 by 120 pixels in size, and displays it on the Recents list on Acrobat's home screen.
The preview is big enough to display recognizable information like a headline, logo, or picture.
If you edit the PDF itself to remove or change any of that information, Acrobat doesn't update that home-screen thumbnail, and anyone who looks over your shoulder can see the original data.
Even if you remove the original thumbnail from the Recents list, it reappears there when you reopen the file.
Adobe quickly reproduced the problem when we reported it, and confirmed that it's a bug that they're working hard to fix.
We'll update this story as soon as we know when the fix will be applied.
Meanwhile, you can work around the problem by saving an edited PDF under another name, so Acrobat can created a new thumbnail, and then removing the old thumbnail from the Recents list.
I was impressed with the iOS versions of Acrobat (I haven't tested the Android versions).
The iPhone version lets you comment on a PDF shared for review, and it was usable even on my small-screen iPhone SE.
The iPad version makes it easy to edit text, insert or delete graphics, or otherwise edit PDFs with almost the same ease that Acrobat allows on a desktop.
There's one major exception to this tablet-based ease of use: if you try to edit a scanned-in PDF instead of a PDF created by exporting to PDF from an application like Word or Excel, you'll probably be frustrated by the almost random-looking bounding boxes that Acrobat puts around scanned-in text—unlike the large bounding boxes around text in PDFs generated from another app.
With desktop-based Acrobat, you can manipulate these bounding boxes easily with a mouse.
On a tablet, even with the Apple Pencil and an iPad, you're more likely to scramble a scanned-in PDF than edit it in any useful way.
One feature that's missing from almost all PDF software is the ability to create a long single-page PDF from a typical information-rich web page that would fill dozens of separate pages if you printed it on paper.
There's no reason for page breaks every 11 or 14 inches when you're reading a web page in a browser or a PDF in a PDF viewer, but the original PDF specification dates back to the print era, so almost every PDF-creating app converts long webpages to multipage PDFs suitable for hard-copy printing.
The only PDF tool I've found that easily creates long, single-page PDFs is Nate Weaver's Paparazzi, available only for the Mac (derailer.org), and I keep wishing for this ability to get built into other apps.
Acrobat Contines to Shine
No one ever went wrong by buying Acrobat, and the latest version seems smoother, faster, and more capable than anything else.
We'll be exploring Acrobat alternatives in the next few months, some of them much lower-priced than Adobe's offerings.
Meanwhile, Acrobat Pro DC and ABBYY FineReader 14 share our Editor's Choice awards for PDF software—but Acrobat stands alone as the only PDF software to choose if you and your workgroup need to share, review, and sign PDFs, and if you want to access them in a web browser or mobile app.
Adobe's Document Cloud PDF-sharing features are unique to Adobe, and nothing else even tries to come close.
Pros
Text indexing for quick searches.
Cloud-based commenting and sharing.
Full editing features in mobile apps.
Converts photo made on a phone into a PDF in the desktop app.
View More
The Bottom Line
Nothing matches Adobe Acrobat Pro DC's depth of features for almost all PDF-editing purposes.
Acrobat is now a full PDF ecosystem that works on the desktop, mobile apps, and the web.
Adobe Acrobat Pro DC, the gold standard among high-end PDF apps, recently received its most significant upgrade in years, and it brings to PDF editing many of the collaborative conveniences that Microsoft Office, Google Docs, and Apple's iWork suite brought years ago to word processors and spreadsheets.
With either an Acrobat-only subscription or a full Creative Cloud suite subscription, whole teams can now comment on a shared PDF file using an Acrobat desktop app, a mobile app, or by logging into Adobe Document Cloud from any web browser.
Acrobat Pro isn't cheap at $14.99 per month, which equates to $179 per year, but it's uniquely rich in features.
You can get most of the Pro version's features in a cheaper Acrobat Standard version, but the Pro version has features that I wouldn't want to be without, including the ability to find differences between two copies of the same PDF file.
That feature lets me use a tablet-based version of the app for PDF editing, scan an image from my phone into a polished-up PDF, or adjust PDFs so that they meet international standards for data-preservation.
The traditional desktop app looks mostly the same as earlier versions, with a cleaner-looking and more easily navigated design.
It slots in new features that allow searching across multiple PDFs and improves access to files on cloud services like Google Drive.
You'll know you're running the current version when you see a new bright red-and-white icon on your PDF files.
Adobe created the PDF format—and later released the PDF specification as a public standard for anyone to work with.
Acrobat has always set the standard for other PDF tools and it's still the best general-purpose PDF editor, but that doesn't mean it's the best for every purpose.
New Features
I use both Acrobat and the equally excellent ABBYY FineReader .I rely on Acrobat's unique sharing and mobile features, and its longstanding feature that embeds an index in a PDF for superfast text searches, but I also rely on FineReader's unique proofreading features for correcting the text of scanned-in documents, its unique flexibility in editing multipage PDFs, and its unique ability to compare two documents in different formats, such as Word documents and PDFs.
Acrobat's new sharing features make it the clear favorite for many corporate uses, but it's far from being the only choice.
We'll be surveying other Acrobat alternatives in the near future.
The new Acrobat desktop app streamlines Adobe's methods for signing and circulating a PDF.
A new Adobe Sign tool in Acrobat's toolbar makes it easy to upload documents and send out invitations for a signature.
Recipients sign the document by opening it via Adobe's cloud services, and they don't need an Adobe account for signing.
The cloud service embeds the signed PDF with a certificate, so that any modification to the document after it's signed triggers a warning that the document has been altered.
All this was possible in earlier versions, but the new version lets you glance the Home screen in Acrobat to track the status of a document, send reminders, and use other signature-related features.
The Adobe Acrobat Pro DC Experience
Over the years, Acrobat has added so many features that it's easy to forget that some of them exist.
One Acrobat feature found nowhere else is its ability to create a type font from the font in a scanned-in document, and use that font when you add or revise text in the PDF.
So you can scan in a document printed with a font that hasn't been used in a hundred years, then use Acrobat's OCR to make the text searchable and selectable, and then type in changes and corrections to the document's text—with Acrobat automatically using a custom font that it created from the scanned-in font.
Acrobat even offers presentation-style animated transitions from one PDF page to the next.
Acrobat continues to use its familiar interface, with a left-hand sidebar that can display page thumbnails, bookmarks, and attachments.
You right-click on the page thumbnails to manage features like page numbering, so you can make the page numbering of the PDF match the page numbering of a scanned document, with (for example) the opening pages numbered with Roman numerals, and the rest with Arabic numerals.
Or, if you've scanned in pages 25 through 45 of a document, you can make the page numbers on Acrobat's menu also show 25 through 45 instead of starting from 1.
This feature is easier to manage in Acrobat than in any other PDF software I've tried.
If you share PDF files, or if you upload them to Adobe's Document Cloud for access on multiple devices, you can access those files from the Document Cloud web interface at documentcloud.adobe.com.
The main screen has a row of tools at the top for uploading, creating, combining, and otherwise managing PDFs.
You can also export PDFs in Office and other formats, reorder pages in a PDF by dragging thumbnails to different positions, and more.
All these tools closely resemble the ones in the Acrobat desktop and mobile apps, but the desktop Acrobat has a much larger range of tools and options, including redaction, optimizing, and indexing tools.
All these tools are easy to reach from the newly improved Home screen in the new Acrobat version.
That Home screen has separate displays of recent files and scans created by the Adobe Scan mobile app.
It also offers quick access to files on your computer, in Adobe's Document Cloud, and in other cloud-based services, including Box, Dropbox, OneDrive, SharePoint sites, and (newly available in this version) Google Drive.
Notably missing is Apple's iCloud Drive, though you can always access iCloud-based files through the My Computer tab.
A second set of tabs leads to shared PDFs, one tab for files that you've sent or received for viewing, another tab with files for commenting and reviewing, and a third for files that you've been asked to sign or asked others to sign.
The whole arrangement is easy to navigate and visually attractive.
In earlier Acrobat versions, you had to go to a Tools tab to find scan-enhancing tools.
The new version has a vertical toolbar at the right edge of the window, giving quick access to commonly used tools, including Adobe's well-designed interface for combining multiple files into a single PDF.
You can drag documents and images into a single window to combine files, rearrange their order by dragging thumbnail images, and click the Combine button to create a single PDF.
PDF Editing
Acrobat's PDF editing features have always been strong, with unique features built on Adobe's type expertise.
When you're editing text in a PDF, for example, Acrobat lets you fine-tune the spacing between words and between letters, making it possible to add or remove words with minimal disruption to the appearance of the page.
Acrobat includes an impressive range of powerful security and privacy options, but we discovered a bug in the latest desktop Acrobat versions that's a potential security flaw.
When you create a PDF or open an existing one, Acrobat creates a thumbnail image of the first page, approximately 150 by 120 pixels in size, and displays it on the Recents list on Acrobat's home screen.
The preview is big enough to display recognizable information like a headline, logo, or picture.
If you edit the PDF itself to remove or change any of that information, Acrobat doesn't update that home-screen thumbnail, and anyone who looks over your shoulder can see the original data.
Even if you remove the original thumbnail from the Recents list, it reappears there when you reopen the file.
Adobe quickly reproduced the problem when we reported it, and confirmed that it's a bug that they're working hard to fix.
We'll update this story as soon as we know when the fix will be applied.
Meanwhile, you can work around the problem by saving an edited PDF under another name, so Acrobat can created a new thumbnail, and then removing the old thumbnail from the Recents list.
I was impressed with the iOS versions of Acrobat (I haven't tested the Android versions).
The iPhone version lets you comment on a PDF shared for review, and it was usable even on my small-screen iPhone SE.
The iPad version makes it easy to edit text, insert or delete graphics, or otherwise edit PDFs with almost the same ease that Acrobat allows on a desktop.
There's one major exception to this tablet-based ease of use: if you try to edit a scanned-in PDF instead of a PDF created by exporting to PDF from an application like Word or Excel, you'll probably be frustrated by the almost random-looking bounding boxes that Acrobat puts around scanned-in text—unlike the large bounding boxes around text in PDFs generated from another app.
With desktop-based Acrobat, you can manipulate these bounding boxes easily with a mouse.
On a tablet, even with the Apple Pencil and an iPad, you're more likely to scramble a scanned-in PDF than edit it in any useful way.
One feature that's missing from almost all PDF software is the ability to create a long single-page PDF from a typical information-rich web page that would fill dozens of separate pages if you printed it on paper.
There's no reason for page breaks every 11 or 14 inches when you're reading a web page in a browser or a PDF in a PDF viewer, but the original PDF specification dates back to the print era, so almost every PDF-creating app converts long webpages to multipage PDFs suitable for hard-copy printing.
The only PDF tool I've found that easily creates long, single-page PDFs is Nate Weaver's Paparazzi, available only for the Mac (derailer.org), and I keep wishing for this ability to get built into other apps.
Acrobat Contines to Shine
No one ever went wrong by buying Acrobat, and the latest version seems smoother, faster, and more capable than anything else.
We'll be exploring Acrobat alternatives in the next few months, some of them much lower-priced than Adobe's offerings.
Meanwhile, Acrobat Pro DC and ABBYY FineReader 14 share our Editor's Choice awards for PDF software—but Acrobat stands alone as the only PDF software to choose if you and your workgroup need to share, review, and sign PDFs, and if you want to access them in a web browser or mobile app.
Adobe's Document Cloud PDF-sharing features are unique to Adobe, and nothing else even tries to come close.
Pros
Text indexing for quick searches.
Cloud-based commenting and sharing.
Full editing features in mobile apps.
Converts photo made on a phone into a PDF in the desktop app.
View More
The Bottom Line
Nothing matches Adobe Acrobat Pro DC's depth of features for almost all PDF-editing purposes.
Acrobat is now a full PDF ecosystem that works on the desktop, mobile apps, and the web.
