Adobe alternatives
Your shootout comparing PDF-editing alternatives to Adobe’s Acrobat Pro ( see issue 310, p72) was a great help to me. I’ve uninstalled Acrobat Pro from my Mac and replaced it with the PC Pro Recommended award-winning Wondershare PDFelement.
I’m hoping you’ll continue to run “shootouts” between alternative apps to Adobe’s subscriber-only products in future. Over recent years, Mac users
have found their expensive Adobe Creative Suite and Acrobat Pro perpetual licences rendered useless by the pincer movement of Adobe’s 2013 move to a subscription-only model and Apple’s ongoing upgrades to the macOS.
My original purchase oof Creative Suite inncluded publishing stalwarts such as Acrobat Pro, Photoshop, Illustrator, In Design and Dreamweaver. As a retired media industry worker, I still wanted to dable with the tools, but I couldn’t justify the expense of a Creative Suite subscription. By refusing to switch to the subscription model I therefore lost the option to progressively update my significant investment in Adobe’s Creative Suite.
For some years, I continued using my old perpetual-licence Creative Suite apps, but their functionality diminished progressively as Apple has updated its OS. Now that functionality has gone completely. That’s because the Catalina OS only supports 64-bit apps and the pre-subscription versions of Creative Suite are defunct because of 32-bit dependencies.
I’m aware that I could set up a secondhand Mac with an old macOS and continue to use my obsolete apps. But I think the time has come to abandon Adobe and move on. That is why I value any advice PC Pro is able to give on alternative creative media products that offer good functionality without the financial drain of an Adobe subscription. Rob Carter