Adobe Acrobat Pro is Really Really Bad

[ftohill]

Hi Guys

Really struggling with how terrible Acrobat Pro has become. It is Sluggish, very buggy and a horrible experience to use.
All the tips for disabling features make zero difference.

What is a viable professional PDF editor that can be used in its place (Not Foxit please or Phantom)

 

[dasigndr]

Hi Guys

Really struggling with how terrible Acrobat Pro has become. It is Sluggish, very buggy and a horrible experience to use.
All the tips for disabling features make zero difference.

What is a viable professional PDF editor that can be used in its place (Not Foxit please or Phantom)

I agree! used to be very good program and now it has become so hard to use. full of glitches.

 

[WildWestDesigns]

Doesn't Foxit make PhantomPDF?

Are you using the most of what the program is capable of or just some basic features? I never was an Acrobat Pro user (I had it, but hardly used it), I mainly used Id or Scribus and rendered to PDF. Depending on what features one needs would determine what one would be able to get away with.

While the standard of PDF itself has been open since the late aughts (so there are going to be some similarities between programs and their abilities) some things are not. The biggest one being JS functionality, if you need that either because of your files or the files that you get via 3rd parties, something like that may keep you in the Adobe fold.

In general, Adobe programs run between 30 to 35 yrs old (or so) depending on which one is talking about. While in of itself, that doesn't mean good or bad, but I'm willing to bet that there is a lot of tech debt in their programs due to how they implemented things over the years, which makes things harder to implement/figure out down the line. Acrobat isn't the only program of theirs that have been noted issues with. Depending on one's workflow, that may not be an issue, but for some that is very much the case.

 

[Fechin]

Same thing has happened with Illustrator too, in fact a little over half a year ago it was becoming sluggish and then Acrobat followed suit. Which also correlated with all the "ai" updates they added to both.
My work computer would be inline with high end gaming PC other than a slightly lower video card in terms of specs, so its out right ridiculous how much is slows down at times.

 

[DL Signs]

In general, Adobe programs run between 30 to 35 yrs old (or so) depending on which one is talking about. While in of itself, that doesn't mean good or bad, but I'm willing to bet that there is a lot of tech debt in their programs due to how they implemented things over the years, which makes things harder to implement/figure out down the line. Acrobat isn't the only program of theirs that have been noted issues with. Depending on one's workflow, that may not be an issue, but for some that is very much the case.

Same thing has happened with Illustrator too, in fact a little over half a year ago it was becoming sluggish and then Acrobat followed suit.

One of Adobe's (and a few others) biggest failure points. They've never completely re-writen their core programs to meet demands, and current technology, they just keep adding, and adding, and adding code and features, which isn't a long term solution to keep software of any type stable. Microsoft had a hard time learning that lesson too.

This is the reason why so many are jumping ship for brands like Affinity, while they haven't caught up with Adobe yet, they're streamlined, stable, and more usable, not bloated down with decades of obsolescent features and code. For those of us who use design software for production, our time is money, and over-buggy, bloated, unstable software just slows production.

 

[WildWestDesigns]

One of Adobe's (and a few others) biggest failure points. They've never completely re-writen their core programs to meet demands, and current technology, they just keep adding, and adding, and adding code and features, which isn't a long term solution to keep software of any type stable. Microsoft had a hard time learning that lesson too.

While that is true on one hand, the downside is that customers also won't tolerate the issues that arise with such a refactor and to do it correctly. Also compound now that we have this "re-write it in Rust" (not a fan of Rust, but that's another topic) or in some other "memory safe" (but not yet truly proven on this scale) language, which is going to have an pressure on dev time.

I remember when Ai got a larger artboard (not infinite artboard) and how people felt that it was a hacky solution (I dropped Adobe long before they did that) and yes that will happen. It is huge tech debt, no doubt, but if they tried to refactor to deliver that feature, it will be no bueno for customers in the near term and for Adobe as well. Customers, for the most part, are more about near term solutions, not long term ones. Why partly SaaS has worked for Adobe, when overall, it's a bad model for customers.

Ideally, they would run 2 repos, one with the newer "modern" codebase and the other would be legacy to keep in maintenance mode until the "modern" one could go live. But would customers really handle a SaaS model to where it's more upkeep and not really getting the latest and greatest anymore, until Adobe was able to deliver on the "modern" one?

No matter what, it's Sophie's Choice.