Third-Party Alternatives to Adobe Acrobat
Advice on PDF creation and editing software, beyond the Adobe products. June 11, 2010
Question
What alternatives are there to Adobe Acrobat (not the reader)? Mine is several versions old, past the upgrade price. I need to add in watermarks and, if possible, tables onto specific sheets.
Forum Responses
(Business and Management Forum)
From contributor C:
Primo PDF or Foxit PDF. There are others.
From contributor A:
Nuances Scansoft Pro for Word and Excel documents. You can get a network license if over 5 users. Blue Beam for CAD documents, markup, estimating, takeoff, export to Excel.
From contributor J:
Zeon DocuCom will give watermarks to PDFs that you're looking for.
From contributor D:
Fineprint.
From contributor K:
If you already have Microsoft Office, there is a free option at microsoft.com to be able to save a PDF from Word, Excel, etc. Gives you all the editing power of Word, Excel, etc. including watermarks and tables with the ability to save it as a PDF.
From the original questioner:
Thanks. I use Fineprint quite a bit, but I can't drop something into an existing page... that I know of. I need to be able to pull pages and parts of pages together from different source software. We downloaded some trial versions of the ones mentioned to give them a test run.
From contributor K:
What file extensions are you working with? Or what programs are you importing from?
From the original questioner:
The bulk is from Cabinet Vision, along with AutoCAD and tables from Excel and text from Word. CV would form the backbone with other items as individual pages or graphics dropped onto existing pages.
From contributor K:
All of those programs have the ability to copy and paste the text. You can put them all into one Word document (including linking Excel tables which will automatically update in Word when you update in Excel), and then just save it as a PDF (I am assuming for emailing to clients, and internal communication).
From contributor A:
Bluebeam lets you staple various PDFs to one document. Scansoft lets you insert/add documents to existing documents.
From contributor M:
Cute PDF works for me.
