It is always morally correct to pirate Adobe.
I had adobe Photoshop pirated for a while, butsomehow it shadow updated and adobe took away my access to using Photoshop without paying for it. That was for the most recent version of Photoshop. I guess adobe found out how to stop people from cracking the .exe.
There are a lot of great replacements for Adobe programs. If you're going to spend money, maybe try them out and then donate to the ones you like!
GIMP or Kita for video editing are solid, DaVinci Resolve is an excellent video editor, and now browsers like Firefox can edit PDFs! Adobe should get bent with their insane fees.
Photoshop alternatives have been making some headway lately:
First, the one everyone knows, GIMP. And yes, it's a steep learning curve, and yes, it's incredibly frustrating. But it's feature rich and (last I checked) the most comparable to Photoshop in what it can do. If you're patient and willing to learn it, it can become a permanent FOSS replacement for you. If you use Photoshop a lot, I'd say this is very much worth the effort.
There's also PhotoGIMP which is an addon that revamps the GIMP interface to make it more user friendly for people that only know Photoshop. Think of it like a translator.
Other options are Photopea: browser based, but is useful for the basic stuff.
Darktable: don't know much about it, seems like it might be more of a Lightroom alternative, but I've heard good things.
And there's the rising star Krita: it was mostly for artists but they're branching out into more photography-based features lately. It's pretty robust.
There's also Affinity Photo 2, which is a true Photoshop alternative in that it's paid software, but it's a one time payment for a permanent license, like Photoshop used to be.
I've been on the GenP "forum". They provide a lot of good resources and it worked for me.
Why bother? Adobe's pdf viewer is a bloated mess. It takes up a huge amount of space and processing power, and it constantly phones-home. It isn't something I'd want on my computer even if they were paying me to have it.
Alternative Take: There's some pretty damn good alternative software. Nothing is a drop in 1:1 replacement, but damn good options. You can easily edit a PDF with LibreOffice.
libreoffice suite got me through university!
Just so yall know, Firefox added a pdf editor.
Even Edge is a pretty good Windows default for viewing and editing PDFs.
So edge is the better app!
Was glad to see it. It’s a very basic start.
Firefox just added PDF editing to the native browser!
Let's get this bread
To all the windows users out there, just use Okular its free and available in the Microsoft Store. its a KDE application and still better than Adobe imo.
I love Okular on my Linux (EndeavourOS with KDE Plasma 6). Wasn't aware Okular was available on PC. Thanks for the info.
PDF is not a format designed for editing. It's an export format designed to be a middle ground between a word processor and a printer.
You can bastardise extra layers onto it, but that's about it.
It was designed for that but not really marketed to be used that way so it's thought of as a lockable universally supported document format.
I mean, you can pretty much completely edit a pdf with Acrobat. Delete elements, move them around, edit text. It may not be designed for it, but it's very much possible.
I gotta admit I've done it a few times because I was to lazy to recreate old, lost templates, so instead I just copied the pdf and edited it with new text and data.
If you have the latest Firefox, it's included now.
And it's pretty good - you can add text and images but you can't yet move pages around or manipulate existing elements.
Also, macOS has some built in PDF editing tools in Preview. You can add text, signatures, draw lines and shapes, highlight, add notes, and split or combine PDFs.
Money aside, Adobe tools for PDF have gotten worse. Ten years ago Adobe was much easier and robust.
All my opinion, of course.
I definitely agree that it's getting harder to use. Working in print, I use it every day and every time they update the ui they find ways to slow down my work flow. My favourite is when they change or even remove keyboard shotcuts that have worked forever or hide certain tools because they've added a newer, worse way to do the same thing.
Haven't used any Adobe programs for over a decade but I believe you. Almost everything's getting worse, smaller (except when that's desirable), less robust and more error prone while simultaneously getting much more expensive.
Shrinkshittififlation is the new bullshit norm.
It's not just your opinion when it's objectively true.
There is at least 1 issue a day with Adobe at my office. Its not 100% adobe's fault but I side-eye those millions of services they install for their app suite.
Inkscape, which is free and open source, does a very competent job of taking part .pdfs and allowing you to modify them these days.
LibreOffice draw is good too
I still think it's crazy that, as a researcher who has to read a lot of PDFs, I can barely find any usable alternatives to Acrobat that have basic annotation features. This is especially true for Android platforms, where I do most of my reading.
pdf24 is very neat.
*opens issue on opensource bugtracker demanding propietary features for free*
"I can't believe the devs haven't implemented this yet!"
*doesn't donate a cent*
Use GIMP or LibreOffice Draw
Inkscape
+1 for LibreOffice. I use PDFGear for my primary now though
There are alternatives, fortunately. If you need to do a lot of editing, Nitro is pretty good. You can pay about $15 a month for it, or pay a one time cost of like $180 and have a lifetime license. If you don't like Nitro, there's plenty of others.
What pisses me off is that Adobe marketing has people locked in with that "Pro Tools" mindset. So many gullible dumbasses think if you don't use Adobe (or Pro Tools) you just can't be taken seriously, and you don't have a "real, professional tool". I think that is less true today than it used to be, but it's still out there.
(Meanwhile if you need a Pro Tools alternative, Reaper is the fucking bomb.)
The software is entrenched. If you’re a graphic designer who exchanges project files with others, you have to use Adobe CC because everyone else is. There’s really no way around that unfortunately.
You have more options if you’re a freelancer who doesn’t need to collaborate however.
That's definitely true. I am mostly complaining about the attitude of contempt some people show for anyone trying to change the landscape. It's like learned helplessness that morphed into smugness (with some people). I totally get it if that's what the boss makes you use. It's not your job to fix that problem.
Wish Reaper was intuitive like Garageband. I need to take like a weekend crash course to understand the basics.
You can now edit PDFs on Firefox
Or a handful of other, open source applications
Avast, yee scallywags!
Fuck PDF's, all my homies hate PDF's
They're not inheritly bad. The idea is no matter what you open the PDF with, it will always look the same.
That doesn't explain why they're so annoying to edit, though
Because they weren't designed to be edited, but somehow here we are
Who really pay for Adobe pdf suite ?
Really I can find many open source solution that can edit PDF, even OCR the PDF for free (you might need to run OCR engine with your CPU, or pay for OCR service)
Eeww. I’m going to kink shame here.
I legitimately do not know why my work pays for adobe acrobat for all employees. Apple Preview is good enough for all the engineers with macbooks
People still use Adobe?
Like every creative professional.
An example of how this manifests:
I’ve started enjoying to use Final Cut for personal video projects. I’m now wishing I could use it at my day job. But we have momentum with Premiere. We need old projects to work. We need to collaborate across the team. Etc.
Momentum keeps Adobe running. This is part of why totally new Adobe apps take off slow. And why Adobe has had success buying out the momentum other companies have built. See Substance, and many other acquisitions.
Autodesk runs on this momentum too.
I’m really happy to watch Blender grow and turn into something that has this sort of Momentum. It’s a wonderful counter example.
This is only one dimension to the whole situation. But I think it’s a strong one.
We just had this discussion at my office. Our newsletter editor is using an Adobe subscription. Even for a nonprofit, the price is going up to $650/year.
The problem is that she has been using Adobe products since the mid 1980s. So to switch, she would have to relearn alternatives to Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobat, and a couple of other things that she has been using for more than 30 years.
We would have to inventory all the features she uses, and then make sure that whatever replacements she uses have the same capabilities. It just doesn't seem to be worth the time and frustration.
How come adobe managed to pull off some weird "monopoly" with that file format? 🙃
I think, because Corp. In Corp, they want someone to be in charge, and take reponsible when something mess up. It is easy for IT to proposed to buy a solution, because the vendor take responsible for mess up, rather than use open-source and have to fix bug themselves.
There are also case where developer push malware into open-source.
This is another example, corp pay to use open source (https://tidelift.com/). They are paying to have someone to cover them if something mess up, like a reliable mantainer.
So i think that why corp still pay for pdf solution, e-signing and stuff like that rather than implement from open source solution.
Firefox
Libreoffice Draw
Gnome Document Viewer
Only thing more pirated than Windows products are Adobe products. Smallest violin, etc etc
PDFs are kind of nice. but ideally we, as a society, took a wrong turn somewhere when we opted for complex proprietary bloated filetypes that nobody can understand or use.
FYI, every version of macOS for over two decades has PDF creating/editing/signing built into the Preview app for free.
If you don't use Macs, you should at least be friends with someone who does.
Just switched to Linux and this is one thing I haven’t found a good solution for yet.
My only real use case is the “fill and sign” features in Adobe Reader. That allows filling with text boxes wherever I want and importing my actual handwritten signature which looks indistinguishable from print > sign > scanned.
Check this: https://github.com/Stirling-Tools/Stirling-PDF
Since you are on Linux just Start it in a Docker container locally and you are golden :)
I do love me some docker. I’ll check it out. Thanks.
I have something for you, kid: https://www.photopea.com/
PDFxchange is good
Anyone ever used free tools like pdfescape or others?
I use various apps for editing PDFs.
- Firefox for quick and small edits
- Xournal++ for typing and drawing over the document to make a new document
- LibreOffice Draw, also for the above
Use ILovePDF, it's online so it works for everyone, and it is free and easy to use
ILovePDF is wonderful. If your company needs to be HIPPA compliant their subscription w/desktop app is cheaper than most others.
