11–20 of 22 posts
Except for the whole PDF-industrial complex. Adobe has a long life ahead (maybe a sad one) as long as PDFs are the document format of choice.
PDF is an ISO standard now.
I thought Adobe was boned 15 years ago (2011) when they debuted Creative Cloud and it was universally despised while their stranglehold on PDF manipulation was already well on its way out, yet here they are still alive and kicking. I chalk it up to the inertia of big dumb orgs that would rather keep paying for a piece of crap they're familiar with than risk trying something new.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
PDF is an ISO standard now.
Genuinely curious, what does that mean? Is the PDF standard now open and free, or does Adobe wield any power? Does it own trademarks (for pdf itself, not Acrobat Reader or sth like that)?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
PDF is an ISO standard now.
Genuinely curious, what does that mean? Is the PDF standard now open and free, or does Adobe wield any power? Does it own trademarks (for pdf itself, not Acrobat Reader or sth like that)?
In practice, I don't know why people are talking about PDF. In any recent time, I have only seen people using Adobe readers by accident and haven't heard about anybody using their editor for any reason. I know of some people that buy their editors, just not any that use it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Genuinely curious, what does that mean? Is the PDF standard now open and free, or does Adobe wield any power? Does it own trademarks (for pdf itself, not Acrobat Reader or sth like that)?
In theory, that means that anybody can create a fully compatible editor/reader, and if Adobe tries to change theirs it will be them that are incompatible. In practice, I don't know why people are talking about PDF. In any recent time, I have only seen people using Adobe readers by accident and haven't heard about anybody using their editor for any reason. I know of some people that buy their editors, just not any tha…
Acrobat is an awful piece of software.
[deleted]
This article captures my feelings 100%. Enough good will has been burned that I'm willing to suffer worse products or higher prices from others than to deal with Adobe again. But you don't have to put up with worse, you actually can have a lot better than Adobe products! This article doesn't mention the competition but Da Vinci Resolve is taking over the next generation of users right now.
Just today for the purposes of ending my blog post in a good light I created the Software category in the directory, to list every alternative I found interesting to Adobe's offerings.
Here the direct link to it! https://martyr.shop/directory/#software
Personally, I use Affinity, Resolve, Darktable, Blender, and Figma. This pretty much covers any visual creative endeavor I have, very comfortably. As a side project, I'm creating patches for Wine to make Affinity work much better under Linux, because Microsoft is also smelling much like Adobe :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Genuinely curious, what does that mean? Is the PDF standard now open and free, or does Adobe wield any power? Does it own trademarks (for pdf itself, not Acrobat Reader or sth like that)?
In theory, that means that anybody can create a fully compatible editor/reader, and if Adobe tries to change theirs it will be them that are incompatible. In practice, I don't know why people are talking about PDF. In any recent time, I have only seen people using Adobe readers by accident and haven't heard about anybody using their editor for any reason. I know of some people that buy their editors, just not any tha…
And I occasionally use Acrobat Distiller to convert old PostScript files to PDF, and to embed fonts into old PDF files created without embedded fonts, mostly because I already have it set up to find and embed almost every pre-OpenType outline font ever released by Adobe, Apple, or Microsoft, along with the OpenType fonts in Adobe Font Folio 11.1, and I've never gotten around to setting up all the fonts in Ghostscript.
The only Adobe product I use more than once or twice a month at this point is Photoshop, and mostly for things that almost certainly could just as easily be done in any number of other image editors at this point, or even ImageMagick. It's just that I've been using Photoshop since version 2 (not CS2 ca. 2005, Photoshop 2.0 ca. 1991), so it's comfortable.