Acrobat Pro
Given the number of free or low-cost PDF readers/editors out there, it seems astonishing that Adobe can still get away with charging well over a tenner a month for a standalone app such as Acrobat Pro (which comes as part of the Creative Cloud subscription). However, you can’t deny that Adobe’s PDF fiddler is powerful.
As someone who spends an ungodly amount of time filling out poorly formatted PDF forms, Acrobat Pro often prevents me from slamming my laptop through the office wall in a fit of a rage. Whereas previously a PDF form without editable fields would have to be laboriously filled by hand, scanned in and then sent back to the recipient, I can now use Acrobat’s Prepare Form tool to automatically detect static form fields and convert them into fillable boxes. Detection works with astonishing accuracy, and even if Acrobat slightly misplaces a box, it can be automatically resized.
Once the form has been made editable, you can then use the Fill & Sign feature to make entering the data easier. Common fields such as your name, address and telephone number can be dragged from the right-hand side of the screen and onto the form, where they can be resized if necessary. And when it comes to signing documents, there’s a range of options: you can insert a scan of your signature (although signing onscreen using the stylus in my ThinkPad X1 Carbon Touch laptop was surprisingly leaden) or you can apply an e-signature, which is becoming increasingly acceptable for legal documents.
Tools that allow you to combine, reorder or protect PDFs from editing come in useful. And, while editing the content of static PDFs remains a hit-andmiss affair dependent on the formatting in the document, the ability to export PDFs into Word and edit the document from there has improved greatly. We sent a complex magazine layout to Word, and almost everything on the page layout was preserved with impressive accuracy. It’s no match for re-editing in InDesign, but for a quick edit (to correct a typo) it may suffice.
The document-markup tools are much improved: if you have a touchscreen device with a stylus, it’s approaching paper-and-pen levels of convenience when it comes to marking document proofs. There are tools for highlighting, striking through and making comments, but with today’s touchscreen and stylus hardware now offering superb accuracy, it’s as easy to use your stylus as a digital pen and scribble notes in the margins. Acrobat Pro is good at automatically recognising when a stylus is being used to mark-up a document on a Windows 10 device, meaning you don’t have to select a pen tool before your scribbles are recognised, and can rub out errors if your stylus supports correction mode. It’s begun to replace pen-and-paper proofing in
PC Pro’s workflow, and with the option to track and trace documents via Adobe’s Cloud server, you can ensure your amendments have been received.