This critically-acclaimed app lets you easily edit PDFs

Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/09/11/this-critically-acclaimed-app.html

Pitstop Pro is the shit for editing PDFs.

App means tiny little program optimized for tiny little phones right? It’s what we called programs back in the DOS age?

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I think Macs always called programs applications.

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I use the iOS verion of this on my iPad.
Much better than the Adobe version in every way.

With the release of OS X and the use of .app bundles to package applications, ‘app’ started to drift into the common parlance on Macs. Also it’s fewer syllables.

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Torrent links anyone?

I mean this is Boing Boing, the pirates’ friend. What are they doing charging money for software? It should be free, free and free.

What the fuck is a PDF anymore? What was the point of developing a filetype that is “flattened” for size and printing consistency if we then just had to go back and create all these softwares to allow editing? The newest version of acrobat pro advertizes all these improved text and image editing capabilities…that all are still kludgy, second rate versions of what you would use in an actual document editor. Why not just pass word processor or publisher-type documents back and forth if we need everything to be editable?

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Because say, forms, as word processing documents are terrible and get completely screwed up (the underlines used as blanks tend to get pushed over by typing) Yes, in a true “paperless office”, forms would be obsolete and everything would just be in a database somewhere, but in the real world at present, forms generally need to be printed out and filed, and a PDF is the current best way of representing one.

That sounds like the appropriate use of PDFs though. What’s weird is this growing trend of building softwares around editing PDFs that have to reverse engineer them for editing. In response, Adobe now has made them progressively more complicated and larger because now they store source images, fonts, and other layout information, rather than just the flattened document, because they know people will want to edit them, and they make bank selling “Acrobat Pro” so that everyone can edit PDFS. I’m just needlessly annoyed that PDFs became ubiquitous for one purpose, and then became a de facto standard for all file exchanges, even files that will clearly need editing later, rather than a standard developing for a simple, free editing software for making things like forms, etc…

Mostly because half my fucking life is fixing peoples PDFs for documents whose source document (Word InDesign, Publisher, etc…) they didn’t have the foresight to keep track of/exchange…

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If they come out with a Windows version then I’ll finally be able to get rid of the office typewriter and/or using MS Paint to fill out PDF forms.

For some reason a lot of small publishers use PDF forms for subscriptions/orders but don’t know how to create a form so it’s possible to fill it in easily. At one time I did have a version of Adobe that allowed me to edit such forms but it disappeared during an “upgrade”, probably because too many people found it useful.

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Everybody who’s anybody has an iPhone, I know (I have an Android - I’m not anybody), and you’ve got to target apps to that platform first. But isn’t releasing software for Mac’s like releasing an app for a Windows phone?

I may be misunderstanding your exact problem - but I find Foxit Reader (free!) works fine for completing amateurishly laid-out PDF forms, either for printing or return email. I generally use the comments facility to insert textboxes with my “answers” in the fields. YMMV…

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Am I missing some features of this application? It seems to me to reproduce the feature set of Preview.

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Um, isn’t that the whole point of PDF forms - that you can type into them?

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Regardless, I protest its use as shorthand for “appetizer.”

The crisis continues…

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Has Boing Boing become a platform for advertising silly and unnecessary products? Geez…

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