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Adobe Acrobat - is there an alternative?

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dr_andus:
One example of strange behaviour with Adobe Acrobat Pro (on Win7, 64-bit): I just tried to save a single 192kb .jpg image as PDF with Acrobat, and 15 minutes later it is still work-in-progress, saying it is creating it. It also threw up a strange Dopus error that I have never seen before (I was saving it from a Dopus image viewer), saying Dopus might be unstable afterwards (though it carried on as fine). When I tried to print the image with the free CutePDF Writer, it created it in like one second with no problems.

So how is it that the expensive product of the company that created the PDF format can't handle a tiny task like that?

J-Mac:
I have used Nuance's PDF Converter Pro for a number of years now instead of Acrobat. It can do just about everything Acrobat can do - at least for all my needs. I believe that Nuance's latest version is actually called Power PDF now. I'm still using their last version which is PDF Converter Pro 8. It costs a lot less than Acrobat too.

Jim

tomos:
What did you get in the end techidave?
Do Adobe even 'sell' Acrobat any more -- or is it all subscription?

On closer look I believe FlexiPDF would have sorted your needs (but haven't used it myself).

Shades:
With my earlier suggested workflow in mind (make the document you want to distribute as PDF first in your favorite piece of software and, when finished, convert it to PDF), I recently discovered the tool: PanDoc.

This is pretty powerful software and has to be used with the commandline. It is able to convert almost anything, the link shows you a quite impressive graph with all the file formats you could be converting between.

Used it myself to convert a few extensive manuals in .DOCX format to convert them to a mediawiki page and that worked like a charm. Screenshot images inside these documents were not added directly, just links that allow you add them yourself quickly enough. An almost 400 page, mostly text, manual took about half an hour in total. Including adding some images and verification of errors in format/structure.

For "funsies" I also converted that manual to PDF, after adding a more comprehensive Latex engine (MikTex) to PanDoc, which had a very satisfying result too. And it was a bit faster than what I usually do when creating a PDF from a manual written in .DOC/.DOCX format (loading up that manual in LibreOffice and use its default PDF converter to create the PDF).

With those experiences, I will gladly recommend this software to anyone who needs any type of document converted to anything.

PanDoc is open source and available for Windows, Linux and Mac. Also available as portable app. The MikText engine is also available as a portable app. Which is how I used them.

Now some do not like to work with the command line, so here is a link to a separate GUI for the PanDoc software.

techidave:
Tomos, we ended up not purchasing anything.  I sent my administrator a link to try Foxit Pro out.  She was the one that would be using this type of software the most.  So I let her choose.  I didn't hear anything back so I don't think she did anything with it.

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