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PDF Editing

Why PDF is difficult for most people

Adobe in the very beginning is capitalizing making people having to buy a license to be able to edit and create PDF's with there Acrobat program. Reading/ Signing/ Form fill a PDF is free, but editing them is paid.

Programs that can make/ open PDF's

  • Photoshop*

  • Illustrator**

  • Adobe Acrobat

  • Microsoft Word (make only)***

  • Microsoft Excel (make only)

  • Foxit PDF Editor

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*Photoshop has cool abilities to save layer information within pdf's, Word will not be able to read this type of data.

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**Illustrator has the higher ability than photoshop to allow for every element with in a PDF to be its own data layer and element this is great for being able to make changes later over and over again and being able to have a fine level of detail.

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*** Microsoft Word can open PDF's but its limited by "Word will convert your PDF to an editable Word document, The resulting Word document will be optimized to allow you to edit the text, so it might not look exactly like the original PDF, especially if the original file contained lots of graphics." So its not bullet proof and will not be great experience to use for most people.

Things to be aware of

Only Foxit and Adobe Acrobat can make special data form fields and sign able signature data, this is why Adobe has choke hold on the PDF market to not allow normal people to be able to edit pdf's that they are just to sign and send back. Adobe has the same level of monopoly as Apple when it comes to using there products.

 

Adobe wants $99 a month per application you use of there's, if you want to just use Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, Premiere Pro, Media Encoder, Adobe Acrobat for each Application your using thats $99 a month x 12 months x 6 programs = that comes out over $7,000 a year just to use Adobe's software. This is what Adobe has a monopoly over and wants most people to pay for just if you want to basic things.

 

Most programs can not complete with the flexibility that Premiere Pro and After Effects has if your doing video work because if you didn't know within Premier Pro you can import After Effects compositions into Premiere Pro if you want to have a legit keyframe animation program. Premiere Pro doesn't have the same system for working with basic text and using keyframes for simple things. Why is that? the reason why Premiere Pro lacks in that department is that it allows Adobe to make you pay for 2 Programs instead of just 1.

 

How does After Effects and Media Encoder make sense? After Effects when you use the Render Queue Only uses your CPU for exporting which can be very slow Only with the 2022 release of After Effects does After Effects use multi-core rendering, ever since the beginning has After Effects only used 1 Single core and thread in your system for previews and rendering out what you have made. With the 2022 release all plugins have to be updated and fixed to make use of multicore rendering or it slows down the whole composition your working on. Media Encoder allows you to just offload the work to your GPU for exporting your After Effects compositions faster without taking ages to wait for. This is by design to make you buy another $99 program for you to use. Media Encoder also will allow you to export Premiere Pro Projects as well. There's also a feature for transcoding that Media Encoder will do transcoding is different from Converting the codec that the piece of video it is that you maybe working with. If you wan to covert and change the file type then use a different program Media Encoder doesn't really do that well if at all.

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Microsoft does the same thing. PowerPoint has the same issues with editing simple text you don't get as many text editing features as you would if you were using Word. Microsoft doesn't even allow you buy just 1 piece of software they sell you a subscription to a whole suite of applications. PowerPoint can work with Excel spreadsheets, And Word can also use Excel spreadsheets as well.

Online Editing?

There is an online software called "Smallpdf" its very convincing to make it sound like anyone can just edit a PDF online but there's barriers to entry that you have to be aware of.

 

This tool is borderline basic at best but for me I think it can help in a pinch for small edits that you need to do quickly, I personally feel that the PDF support with Illustrator is pretty good to the point that you can extract out all the elements you want and need to edit.

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Small PDF does provide 21 features for you to do with PDF's and conversions. 

 

Issues:

  • They dont state clearly that you have to sign up with your email.

  • You have to accept cookie tracking before you can attempt to use there software.

  • They also require you to pay or run on a 7 day trial for there web tools.

  • PDF's that use Photoshop/ Illustrator artboards don't render at all, or only allow for partial editing, its not designed for this at all.

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