PDFs are extra nasty because the standard allows a great many things, so it’s complex and (as in your example) two PDFs that don’t seem to differ on nontechnical inspection can either be nearly as good as a sane text format in terms of extracting and editing; or only possible to ‘edit’ because a fairly high end OCR system is busily papering over the holes for you; but also because “PDF” commonly means “file that Acrobat put ‘.pdf’ on the end of” rather than “PDF/A as implemented by standards hardasses”.
The products of Adobe’s ongoing war to make PDFs the choice for forms as well as for finished documents seem to be particularly bad; along with the (thankfully more likely to be older; but still extant; relics of when they were fighting directly with web pages and Office documents by allowing the embedding of basically anything in PDFs). Pretty common to find examples that don’t even render properly in Adobe’s own tools unless you go in and set every security-related option to “hurt me plenty”.
By the time the subject comes up it’s typically too late; but the frustrating part about “alternatives to Acrobat” is how often the best one is a small change to workflow(that you would have had to make in the past; which is why we’ve ended up here) rather than a direct substitute.
As someone who has the distinct displeasure of dealing with Adobe licensing at work it’s enormously frustrating to see how often someone comes in for an Acrobat Pro license because they didn’t treat PDFs as a primarily print-equivalent output format; and now have something that used to be a word document; but now needs to be converted back because the source file was lost after the PDF was generated(even worse when it’s a PDF form that has been filled out and (digitally) signed and they are all confused about why you can’t just empty the form fields on a signed document without it complaining):
Obviously you can’t really just say “wow, that sucks, hope you enjoy retyping”; but literally thousands of dollars, probably tens of them, have been thrown at Adobe more or less entirely because people didn’t treat PDFs as final artifacts of a document processing workflow whose intermediate sources should be preserved.
We certainly do have people who need to edit PDFs from the outside; and those I find it easier to sympathize with, since the mistake was made for them; but there’s something that eludes a lot of people about PDF handling: we don’t get people who just toss their document after they print them; then come in and expect the scanner to OCR them bac to health; but it happens all the time with PDFs.
Well, if you go by this list, anyways. It’s definitely lacking in any sort of design/graphics/video software, which I could only figure out by going through the entire unorganized list. I didn’t even recognize most of the “popular” software that these are alternatives to, making me wonder how popular they really are. Certainly someone should come up with a list of open source software that are alternatives to popular, end user software, because this ain’t it (and obviously isn’t intended to be).
Although, to be fair, these days that also might actually mean that Google is absolute shit for searches. Occasionally I run across some really neat, useful open source software and wonder why I’d never heard of it before… Beyond Google itself, the web as a whole seems to have become a really hostile place for finding/sharing information.
I’ve only vaguely been following the development of Godot, but it sure seems like, ever since Unity publicly alienated its user base, that it’s quickly gone from “cute” to “impressive.”
This is not open source. But it has a perpetual license. No commercial interest, just a happy user for years.
They also have products for bulk-editing pdf files.
I can’t remember what the difference is between the free and the paid product, but I bought the paid product after trying the free one.
Yep. My work involved getting deeply familiar with software workings, and I have zero patience for gate-keepers.
Apart from egos, I think there are a few other reasons many products remain hard:
If a business is based on support subscriptions for free software, they may believe they have a perverse incentive to keep it hard to use. If it’s easy, they might not be able to imagine a need for the support business. Thanks, capitalism!
If it’s a smaller product, it might be someone’s part-time passion project, and it’s hard enough to keep it working at all.
Coding skills have little overlap with User Experience design skills. I’ve seen plenty of coders in open source projects, but not a lot of UX designers.
Another (non-opensource, but with perpetual license) suggestion for you is Qoppa pdf studio. I was looking for an alternative to Bluebeam (a powerful pdf editor used in construction) and this is the closest i could find, i gave up completely on open source for pdf editing. Bonus that it runs on linux too. Between that and BricsCAD, i have been able to pretty much abandon windows.
This is almost a year old (from May 2023), but it lists some alternatives to Adobe products. They aren’t all open-source and prices may have changed since then (I know Sketchbook has a small pay-for-extras fee now), but it might offer options to look at:
I second the recommendation for Irfanview, which is lovely for basic image tasks. I’ve heard good things about DaVinci for video work and Krita for art, but I don’t have enough experience with either to say for sure. The graphic doesn’t seem to include many apps for tablets, which is another kettle of fish…
Well, it’s a brand new site, apparently a whim of someone, and they are just sitting back and waiting for the crowd sourcing to take effect. Creation Date: 2024-02-29T16:29:48Z
Our shop has fully embraced open source. The argument about “paid support” floated around for a long time, but eventually we realized that was mostly scary words said by salespeople at companies like Redhat and Oracle. We take care of our own now, and if you want a licensed, supported version of anything that has a free open source equivalent, be prepared to justify it to a VP.
We’re not completely crazy. For example, we use the enterprise licensed versions of certain packages because the pure open source versions are intentionally kept basic, and only their enterprise licensed versions offer “corporate features”, such as high speed replication and multi-datacenter high availability clustering. That’s by design so they can sell expensive licenses to bigger clients that need it, and who obviously can afford it.
But yeah, Broadcom is not our favorite vendor at all. I think we’d rather chew off VMware like a coyote in a trap than pay them another nickel.
Open Source Alternative is a privately curated list of open source source alternatives that actually lets you search by the name of the proprietary software you are trying to replace. They actively seek user suggestions. A couple of times I found suggested alternatives which were clearly errors, and these were quickly fixed when I pointed them out. However, I haven’t used the site much in the last couple of years, so not sure if it’s still actively managed. It seems to omit some recently popular software. For example, they don’t mention the open source Godot, which became way more popular a year or so back when the makers of the competing proprietary software Unity decided to make major changes to their pricing structure.
When I first saw the BB post my first guess was that OpenAlternative had decided to ripoff all the data from the much older Open Source Alternative site, but comparing the software listed, I guessed wrong.
Wikipedia’s massive List of free and open-source software packages can also be useful. It’s not designed to let you search for a replacement for a particular proprietary package, but it does do a good job of classifying the open source software by purpose. If you know what category your proprietary software falls in, you can usually find some good suggestions there.
And that last “if” is a big one. Microsoft actively avoids the terms “word processor” and “spreadsheet”. They always talk about Word and Excel. They don’t want you to realise that Word and Excel are respectively a word processor and a spreadsheet, because if you do, you’ll have no trouble finding the free open source alternatives: LibreOffice Writer and Calc. I don’t know if it’s still true, but the spell-check dictionary that came with the Microsoft products used to not contain the word “spreadsheet”!
