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Why Use Adobe Acrobat Instead of other PDF Converters

The marketplace is flooded with PDF writers that promise to convert any file format into PDF.

Like Acrobat, you can install these third-party PDF generators as virtual printers and create PDF files from any application that has the Print button. Some services allow you to convert files by email - you send them a file as an email attachment and they'll mail it back to you as a PDF.

That's not all. WordPerfect and OpenOffice have in-built PDF printers. Microsoft released a free PDF add-in for all popular Office 2007 programs except Outlook. Then there are online suites like Google Docs and Zoho Office that allow you to save documents as PDF inside the browser without requiring any add-ins.

When there are so may Acrobat alternatives for creating PDF files, why spend a few hundred dollars for buying a single license of Adobe Acrobat? Adobe offers some reasons for using Adobe Acrobat software:

  1. Adobe supports PDF files opened in the free Adobe Reader only if the PDF was created by an Adobe product.
  2. Adobe makes the most compact and most accepted PDF files. Clones often don't do everything necessary in all cases to meet court standards.
  3. Adobe PDF is structured (tagged) allowing your firm to meet government Section 508 accessibility requirements.
  4. Only Adobe allows you to Reader-enable a PDF so that users of the free Adobe Reader can fill and save PDF forms locally for offline use, review, comment or markup, type anywhere in the PDF document using the Typewriter tool and digitally sign PDF documents.
  5. New standards around PDF will always appear in Adobe products first. One recent example: PDF/A (PDF for Archive), an ISO standard adopted by the US Federal Court system, the NARA (National Archive and Records Administration), and the Library of Congress as the standard format for archiving digital documents.
  6. Adobe offers OCR, creation, watermarks, redaction (delete sensitive or confidential text and images), bates numbering, review, etc. all in one package, not spread across several packages or requiring additional products.

So should you uninstall that free PDF converter and shell out $300 for Acrobat Professional ? Well if you are an enterprise user or in the legal industry or work in teams gathering comments and reviews from colleagues and customers, the answer is mostly yes.

ISO has ratified PDF/Archive as the standard for long-term preservation of electronic records. But if you are like most of us and create PDFs for personal use because they retain the formatting and layout or just because PDF files are safe from editing, then the free Acrobat clone in your computer can stay without problems.