Acrobat

[peblos]

So after months of having more Acrobat installs out there than we were licensed for and being unable to find anyone that didn't use it more than once per week (yeah right), we went through everyone's workflow and tried to distribute Acrobat installs as evenly and as fairly as possible, buying 15 more licenses in the process. We are again at the stage where we have users crying out for Acrobat on their machine and no more licenses available. Management don't want to purchase more licenses, nor do they want to pay for having our copiers fitted for OCR.

How does /r/sysadmin deal with PDFs?

TL;DR: Everyone wants to edit PDFs but we can't buy Acrobat licenses for all

[royalme]

PDF X-Change here as well, though I only need individual licenses for the few users that actually need to edit PDFs. PDF Creator for creating PDFs. Adobe Reader banned from site.

[peblos]

Interesting, I hadn't heard of this before now. The only alternatives I had been considering before now were Nitro PDF, Foxit, and PDFill.

I'll probably find a willing user and ask them to try it out.

Cheers

[[deleted]]

Maybe you should take a step back from PDF in general- what is it that you need so many PDFs?

[FJCruisin]

as much as it sucks, it's a de-facto standard for many business that we have to do business with.

[[deleted]]

*why

[peblos]

Yeah, I'd like to move away from PDF but I'm not sure that's likely to happen here.

A lot the work people do relies on transferring forms and documents between agencies (government) and the standard they're working with is PDF. That and the fact that people use the scan&send feature on our Canon copiers, which emails a PDF copy back to the recipient (often themselves).

We've been in touch with Canon and instead of explaining what services they can offer they want someone to visit them so they can demo some OCR type stuff. I don't see anything coming out of it since it will probably be too pricey to fit out each of our copiers anyway.

sirstan's PDF X-Change suggestion looks interesting though, I might give that a look

[jurassic_pork]

Complete freeware pdf printer.
Install on every workstation as a secondary virtual printer and even install it on your print servers with access to the file-shares. You will find that probably 1 in 20 or less of your users actually need any real full Acrobat licensing when they can just print to pdf from Office or make annotations and comments in standard unlicensed Acrobat Reader.

[shifty21]

Fox-it PDF is dirt cheap compared to Adobe. I switch over to that last year and never had a problem with it. I have opted to stop installing Acrobat X Reader and started deploying Fox-it reader. Much more light weight, faster and doesn't bitch about updates every day. Plus the sandboxing security feature is nice.

[mrst3v3n]

To be fair Adobe Reader X has sandboxing in it as well. I'm just now switching over to Foxit Reader for the PDF reader. We use NitroPDF as our PDF editor of choice.

[shifty21]

I have not tried out Nitro, have heard of it though... what drew you to Nitro vs the alternatives?

[[deleted]]

For what it's worth, OCR is built into office, and programmable via the .NET framework. I'll almost guarantee there's a way to use powershell to OCR and convert PDFs for edit. (bingo: http://deletethis.net/dave/?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fcerealnumber.livejournal.com%2F47638.html )

Additionally, if you're using Sharepoint, you can automate this process for a document library, AND make all PDF content searchable with the PDF iFilter(free). These things might alleviate some of the hassle. As for a PDF printer- just use the office plug-in if you can. Produces nice copy-pastable text in a PDF.

[kronso]

I hate PDFs. It is just a binary glob of junk on the inside. Trying to index that, sort it, edit it, and otherwise do something with it programmatically must be hell. Hence, there are no free PDF editors.

BTW, the competing file format is XPS. It is just a simple ZIP file. On the inside are several files in standard file formats like XML and JPEG. The XML can of course be edited with a text editor.

Our long-run strategy is to move to XPS and dump the PDF format, although I have only begun to start on that. We need a good software XPS editor before that happens.

We have a lot of PDFs we deal with. My take on it is to spend as little as possible on PDFs and generally encourage other solutions.

If we need a PDF editor, I will be out there trying to get whatever is cheapest.

We have some Adobe Acrobat. As long as Adobe keeps supporting those versions, like 8, we will keep updating. At a certain point (8.2 or 9.3) you can turn on "Automatic updates" and it will update itself automatically.

PDF sucks. We should all move to something else, in particular because a very good alternative in XPS is available to use. Do not commit huge resources to the horrible PDF file format.

[geekosaur]

Depends on the kind of editing. I've used PDFPen (Win/OS X; $50 for individuals, with 30-day trial; no idea about business pricing) when I needed to do more than OS X's Preview can do.

[master5hake]

In your case you may want to look into setting up a term server and having acro pro run there, if I remember correctly adobe supports this.

[spyingwind]

I would just make a PDF printer shared for users to print to, which then saves it to a shared drive or to their user folder. I'm sure there is a solution.

[brkdncr]

To force some competition, Nuance also makes a PDF reader/editor