Adobe now requires you to purchase a subscription to rotate PDF pages

I’m 80% at requiring it for anyone at the company that doesn’t need full acrobat to create PDFs. And even then I’m close to pushing the version of FoxIt that does that.

sam345• 4 years ago

Foxit

xnx3• 4 years ago

PDF viewing: Chrome PDF editing: LibreOffice

Technetium• 4 years ago

In chrome://flags you can search for "PDF" and enable the following: Performs OCR on inaccessible PDFs, PDF XFA support, Accessible PDF Forms, Enable Region Search on PDF viewer.

UFOFlyer• 4 years ago

Okular from KDE project, they have a windows release too.

mxuribe• 4 years ago

I use okular and it works great on linux. Once in a while PDFs with forms display funny, or some minor challenges with data entry....but not sure if the issue is how the pdf was made or if okular. Nevertheless, i really like it. Plus as stated, a few KDE applications like okular happliy can be used on Windows. (For work machine, where i am forced to use Windows, i happily have used the Kate text editor.)

shassard• 4 years ago

pdf arranger is pretty slick if you're on linux: https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.github.jeromerobert.pdf...

wgriffin13• 4 years ago

I actually like PDF Expert better than Adobe itself. It is easier and more responsive for general editing work.

HelloMcFly• 4 years ago

I think PDF Xchange is the most feature rich for what I use it for. You do have to buy once to unlock all functionality, but a very large amount is available in the free version.

vladharbuz2• 4 years ago

On Linux: zathura, evince, okular for viewing. I don't know of a friendly GUI tool for editing PDFs, but combinations of imagemagick and tools such as pdfunite work well. A bit off-topic, but nomacs and imv are nice for images.

jabroni_salad• 4 years ago

For simple operations I like "PDF Split and Merge"

isatty• 4 years ago

Preview, on Mac. It’s great.

RockRobotRock• 4 years ago

torrent Adobe Acrobat XI, and don't feel bad about it because it's Adobe.

quicon• 4 years ago

IlovePDF desktop app for Windows is quite good and free.

https://www.ilovepdf.com/desktop

SllX4• 4 years ago

For anyone on a Mac: all of these features in the screenshot are free with Preview. I assume OP is not, but something people should keep in mind.

sys_64738• 4 years ago

This ^. Don't give Adobe money is my motto.

brokenmachine• 4 years ago

Mine is don't give Apple money.

unsupp0rted• 4 years ago

In Preview on Mac:

CMND+R = rotate right

CMND+L = rotate left

tjohns• 4 years ago

Preview.app is very underrated. It feels like a huge omission that other platforms don't have something similar built in.

And if you need more editing features than Preview.app (which is already very powerful), PDF Expert [1] is my go-to on the App Store.

[1] https://pdfexpert.com/

marban• 4 years ago

Preview.app — Underrated since 2001.

qubex3• 4 years ago

I distinctly remember a precursor of some sort being available on NeXTStep 3.0 in ‘95 or thereabouts.

Etheryte• 4 years ago

I wish this got talked about more, Preview is both crazy good and free. You can split PDFs apart, merge multiple different ones into one file, use password protected files, edit and annotate them, add your signature, and so much more. Best of all, it just works, all the time.

brk• 4 years ago

What is the trick to merging multiple PDFs into one? That never seems to work for me.

YVoyiatzis• 4 years ago

Agreed, but the inability of Preview to edit text must be noted.

alwillis• 4 years ago

Preview is great.

I can also recommend Skim (free and open source) for macOS for some additional functionality [1].

[1] https://skim-app.sourceforge.io/

heavymark• 4 years ago

Love Preview and for all those basics find it much easier than Adobe for rotating, rearranging, deleting, merging, etc. Alas for some things still need Acrobat. For forms that need to be filled in more often than not preview is problematic where the entered text doesn’t appear right or issues with drop-downs etc. Like how I prefer safari but still run into compatibility issues sometimes and need Chrome. Also Adobe is better at compressing file size while retaining quality. And finally if I need to ocr a file and make the text or elements editable need Adobe. Would love to see Preview improved in those areas as solid as Preview it’s not one to see growth in features or compatibility over the decades.

aendruk• 4 years ago

It’s better than free: already paid for.

throwoutway• 4 years ago

I had to download Acrobat for something (I don’t recall what) on my work computer, and it set itself as a default, and for the past few weeks whenever i open a PDF I’m wondering why it’s taking forrreeevvverr. Then I remember it’s Adobe and not Preview.

I need to uninstall it but I keep forgetting. This is a good remembrance

uniqueuid• 4 years ago

Stuff people don't know about Preview.app:

- Paste images that were copied to the clipboard. Just open Preview and press CMD-N

- Split, re-arrange and merge PDF documents. Just drag pages into the sidebar

- Sign documents. Click the annotation button in the menu bar, sign either on touchpad, ipad or hold an ink signature on paper into the webcam.

- OCR (new with macOS ventura). Just click/drag/double-click on text in images.

What more did I forget?

SllX4• 4 years ago

Paste images that were copied to the clipboard. Just open Preview and press CMD-N

This one is new to me. TIL. Thanks!

dont__panic• 4 years ago

You can remove white/back backgrounds from images as well, with the "Magic Lasso" selection tool. Adjust the selection level until it covers the object you want, cmd+c to copy that object out of the image, then cmd+n to create a new image from that selection.

yamtaddle3• 4 years ago

It's legit one of the reasons I'll have trouble ever leaving macOS. I've not seen anything as good at its particular niche. It's the perfect intersection of lightweight, snappy, reliable (so many other PDF tools are crashy or prone to getting in weird, broken states), and featureful.

nathell• 4 years ago

OCR works for me in Monterey.

nabaraz2• 4 years ago

I recently had to crop a pdf, Export pdf to png, crop and save as pdf. All from Preview app.

bbx• 4 years ago

Not really something you missed but if I want to increase the “viewport” of an image, I just take a screenshot (to clipboard), create a new document, paste the screenshot, and then go back to my original image and copy/paste it to the new document.

This is helpful if you want to extend an image horizontally or vertically (or both).

You could also increase the dimensions of the original image, but it would “zoom in”, which I don’t want.

Not sure I explained it well…

rado• 4 years ago

Annotation. Colour correction including white balance picker. And so on

sicp-enjoyer• 4 years ago

Preview is the best tool for working with PDFs I have used. Just being able to cut pages and reorder them is strangely difficult for everything else.

yamtaddle3• 4 years ago

You can also use Preview to carve up PDFs and assemble new documents from the pages of multiple other PDFs. This is really handy for making e.g. custom bestiaries for RPGs, using pages from official books, since usually you use only a few beasts in a campaign, out of a set of potentially hundreds of first- and third-party ready-to-use beasts. Nice to have them all in one PDF, with nothing you don't need. And of course you can pdf-export whatever you like from your own documents and mix that in, too.

For some reason I've never bothered to figure out, I do sometimes have to copy a PDF before it'll let me re-arrange or copy/cut individual pages out of it. But not always. I assume it's because of some kind of flag on downloaded files in macOS, but IDK.

riedel• 4 years ago

For anyone else I recommend pdf arranger [1]

[1] https://github.com/pdfarranger/pdfarranger

topicseed• 4 years ago

And you can easily edit password-protected PDFs by "Printing" as PDF and edit the "print out" PDF.

qubex3• 4 years ago

Don’t forget that the whole macOS GUI is based on PDF.

aequitas• 4 years ago

Back when macOS was still called Mac OS X, (a subset of) PDF was the internal rendering format for Quartz rendering engine[0]. Their tech demo's also boasted about the ability to trivially edit PDF's. I don't know if any of that still remains in the current macOS versions, but I'm glad PDF editing and 'printing' (directory to PDF file or Preview as PDF) support was never dropped. Along with the excellent built-in screenshot and recording shortcuts.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2000/05/mac-os-x-dp4/4/

goosedragons• 4 years ago

There's a lot of free tools that will do this too on all platforms. Xodo is my go to on Windows/Android/iOS. On Linux evince and okular are both pretty good.

debug-desperado• 4 years ago

Had to uninstall Adobe Reader this week because it's become unbearably slow on my 2015 MacBook Pro. I'm talking it can't smooth scroll a 2-page resume PDF.

Preview does the trick just fine.

guelo• 4 years ago

Preview is very capable but it's UI is so opaque. After years of use I still discover features accidentally, almost like easter eggs.

clnq• 4 years ago

And for those on Windows and Linux, a somewhat close alternative for Preview is Okular - https://okular.kde.org/en-gb/.

1letterunixname3• 4 years ago

And guess who developed CUPS? :)

SllX4• 4 years ago

Easy Software Products.

https://web.archive.org/web/20070109004135/http://www.cups.o...

warbler73• 4 years ago

"Rotating is hard!"

Victerius• 4 years ago

Please drink verification can.

1letterunixname3• 4 years ago

Welcome to the Identity Processing Program of America!

xnx3• 4 years ago

Protip: I only recently learned that LibreOffice is a pretty good PDF Editor. https://ask.libreoffice.org/t/how-do-i-edit-pdf-files-create...

DreadY2K• 4 years ago

In my experience, LibreOffice Draw usually messes up the formatting of any PDFs I open in it. Nothing entirely unsalvageable, but text gets slightly moved around and winds up overlapping other text in a way that's annoying for future readers of the document.

rahimnathwani3• 4 years ago

This is not a pro tip. LibreOffice can import a PDF and export a PDF but, even with minimal changes, the PDF you get out won't necessarily have a similar binary representation or appearance to the original.

xnx3• 4 years ago

Most of the PDF editing I do is the equivalent to physically typing over, covering over, or cutting elements out of a print document. I would not expect a an editor to be able to (for example) reflow the layout of PDF.

spoils19• 4 years ago

This is not a pro tip.

I think there's also the implication of 'pro', as if the rest of HN are not software professionals. I'd suggest GP to revise the structure of their comment in order to not offend the entire forum.

plgonzalezrx8• 4 years ago

In my experience, every open source PDF Reader/Editor, is ATROCIOUS and messes up the formatting big time. I wish there was an alternative out there that was as good as adobe, but as with all of their other tools, the alternatives always leave much to be desired.

And then adobe takes advantage of that fact (Their product is second to none), and rail their customers by making their products expensive AF.

TLDR: Adobe products are AMAZING. Their pricing structure and marketing techniques and straight up disrespect to their customers is absolute garbage.

imagetic• 4 years ago

I would hope this problem wouldn't apply to anyone who uses Hacker News.

AshamedCaptain2• 4 years ago

When has Reader allowing rotating pages? I don't think Reader has ever allowed saving or modifying PDFs in any way save for perhaps filling form fields...

What Adobe is doing, however, is to add icons and menu entries for editing functionality that will never work in Reader, advertising the features of their PDF editing software. That's, basically, yet another extremely intrusive advertising strategy that's annoying as hell and that I guess we are bound to see even more of it in the future.

merb• 4 years ago

I wondered as well. adobe pro always needed a subscription/paid license.

jnsie• 4 years ago

Oddly enough when I right click and and select 'Rotate view clockwise' it still works.

jjice• 4 years ago

Maybe not rolled out to you yet? I'm sure they have a progressive roll out system in case of breaking updates.

bearmode3• 4 years ago

The only rollout here is they've added another ad for their subscription. Acrobat Reader has never had edit capabilities - you can't and have never been able to edit and save the PDF in any way (except filling form fields maybe?).

You could always rotate the view, that's not changed.

mjrpes• 4 years ago

The rotate option under the view menu works, but doesn't let you save the rotated view. If you attempt to rotate pages from the edit menu, you get a pop up forcing you to subscribe to use that feature.

nabaraz2• 4 years ago

I have been actively moving away from Adobe products. Recently purchased Affinity Photo to replace photoshop and I use Preview (on Mac) for all pdf work.

cydonian_monk• 4 years ago

The Affinity products on Mac are some of the cleanest, polished, reasonably easy to use, responsive, and stable pieces of commercial image software I've used in years. Very impressed with what they've done so far.

kcartlidge• 4 years ago

They also have a good offer on at the moment. They’ve released V2 and are offering all 3 apps on all supported formats for a single payment. Personally I only use Designer so didn’t partake, but even that is discounted a little.

qubex3• 4 years ago

I’ve ben actively avoiding Adobe for about a decade now. Affinity is great. Adobe needs to learn to respect its users and not take them for granted while feeding them crap.

bluedino• 4 years ago

There truly is some evil genius (?) running Adobe and just laughing a diabolical laugh as they come up with new 'features'

mavu• 4 years ago

2028: Adobe requires additional fees to display vowels.

jahewson2• 4 years ago

Rl sftwr dsnt nd vwls nywy.

politelemon• 4 years ago

Crtv cld

323• 4 years ago

2030: PDF viewer takes 1 minute to start, unless you subscribe to the "start in 3 seconds deluxe option".

t0bia_s2• 4 years ago

2032: AI constantly check yor workspace. In case of politically incorrect content you wouldnt be able to export.

tasty_freeze• 4 years ago

I have an Acrobat Pro 7.0 license I paid for years and years ago. I have a single use case: I scan a lot of vintage computer manuals as a hobby. Pro offers fine control over compression options. Acrobat has been nagging me for more than a decade to register it (though I registered it when I bought it). A couple of times I've had computer crashes or migrations and getting 7.0 reinstalled on the new machine was a pain.

It galls me to think they want $500 for me to buy Pro again when I don't need or want any of the new features. I just want the existing functionality I paid for to continue working.

Do any of the alternatives have similar fine control of compression options that Acrobat Pro exposes? I'd switch in a heartbeat.

NotYourLawyer• 4 years ago

Same here but with 9.0. My only complaint is that it‘s a little wonky with a high DPI display.

AshamedCaptain2• 4 years ago

The large number of ancient Acrobat Pro licenses floating on ebay seems to hint you are not the only one...

moepstar• 4 years ago

ColorSync Utility on macOS (sorry, not sure of the right name in English) allows to add filters.

I've used it to great success for down-/resizing/-sampling all kind of PDFs which sometimes are basically full pictures on each page.

Create own filter, add "picture compression", mode "JPEG", move the slider just a little right from the middle...

Start ColorSync app, open PDF, select filter from lower left, click "Apply" and then either "Save" or "Save as..."

tjoff2• 4 years ago

Windows: Sumatra PDF. Linux: Zathura.

These are so much better than Acrobat. Might not do everything you can imagine but they are excellent and a very good default.

rahimnathwani3• 4 years ago

Sumatra PDF is also, AFAIK, the best Epub reader for Windows.

jahewson2• 4 years ago

Sumatra is uses the MuPDF library which is excellent. Zathura however uses Poppler which is lacklustre.

tjoff2• 4 years ago

There is a MuPDF plugin for zathura that at least some distros seems to use by default.

parker_mountain• 4 years ago

Apple:

Apple has been quietly using the same screenshot functionality since the 90s, and has continually iterated over improvements on Preview since the early 2000s.

I find the macos shortcuts to be poorly chosen and un-discoverable, but they've stuck with it, so finding how to take a screenshot is extremely easy.

Microsoft:

Microsoft is on their third major revamp of screenshots. There are six(!) different ways to invoke a screenshot on Window 11 - printscrn key, Win+Shift+S, snip and sketch, snipping tool, game bar, pressing the volume up+power buttons on supported devices (but not all). Microsoft's official website suggests third party tools in their app store as well. Each way offers different options (such as whole screen, individual app, cropping, etc). Some options quietly redirect you to other options, while still offering the previous option in contextual menus. Options will vary in where they place the image as well - filesystem, clipboard, or directly into a window for you to chose.

Microsoft uses their browser as a featureless PDF reader. Other Preview.app functionality can be found within a combination of paint.exe and the new Windows Photos app - each with a completely different UI paradigm. They do not have an OCR solution - or if they do, I haven't found it.

My understanding is that Windows 12 is a direct attempt to resolve a lot of these issues, and that Windows 11 has been deemed "transitional", but it's still extremely exhausting. I personally still prefer Windows over macOS (for a lot of reasons unrelated to Windows' incredibly boneheaded rough edges); but, please, Microsoft, what the fuck are you doing!?

derjames• 4 years ago

I am using Evince in both Linux and windows.

tiahura• 4 years ago

Fake news. Acrobat Reader (free) never let you edit PDFs. Reader has always let you rotate the view. <View> <Rotate View>. Clockwise and Counterclockwise!

ourmandave• 4 years ago

Couldn't rotate just be an in-app purchase?

I don't use it enough to need a subscription.

GavinMcG• 4 years ago

Could, sure, but that would mean you pay them less money. They want you to pay them more money.

unixhero• 4 years ago

I have used PDFsam for years. It rules

an1sotropy2• 4 years ago

I remember learning PostScript (~1993?) by reading the Red Book, and thinking how awesome it was that this company Adobe, which I'd never heard of, had created a new programming language just to solve once and for all the problem of specifying vector graphics to a printer, and had written such a nice book to help others use the language. It was magical to be able to write a text file in emacs, send it to the printer, and have cool images come out.

Good old days.

btw PDF started as Project Camelot at Adobe in ~1990, as a way to capture the results of executing a PostScript program [1]. I'm curious if there is still that kind of foundational innovation happening at Adobe, and if not, why it died?

[1] https://blog.adobe.com/en/2018/06/14/evolution-digital-docum...

dublin• 4 years ago

Did you ever look in detail at Common Ground? IIRC, it was not only an Adobe PDF alternative, but the format was considerably more modern and powerful. Sadly, it seems like it lost just because PDF was similar to PostScript, a fact that never really made any real difference to anyone but programmers writing PDF parsers. (And PostScript smelled like the future, since Display PostScript was the basis for displays (well, kinda) at NeXT and Sun, and those were definitely the cool kids...

an1sotropy2• 4 years ago

That sounds cool; hadn't heard of it. The web searches I've just tried to look for technical details yielded not much; are there any extant open specs?

blacklight• 4 years ago

I've used a bunch of ImageMagick scripts for a while to export, rotate and manipulate PDFs. No need ever to buy subscriptions.

out-of-time• 4 years ago

More than ever I feel vindicated in the decision to avoid non-free software. It's limiting of course but in tandem with a fully reproducible system it is guaranteed that my current workflows will always be available... I can't imagine doing anything in software without that foundation.

The recent news about Adobe removing Pantone colors from existing projects is even more egregious:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/1/23434305/adobe-pantone-su...

bearmode3• 4 years ago

This isn't an option for most professionals who need Adobe's products.

nip• 4 years ago

Shameless plug: for anyone looking for an alternative, I’ve been building SimplePDF.eu [1] on my free time for last couple of years or so.

The editor is entirely free to use and works locally (nothing gets sent to my server: neither the document you load nor the data you fill in [2])

[1] https://simplepdf.eu

[2] https://simplePDF.eu/privacy_policy

uptown• 4 years ago

I'm in the process of removing Adobe from my pipeline. What's the best alternative to Lightroom?

vladharbuz2• 4 years ago

darktable is good. https://www.darktable.org/

t0bia_s2• 4 years ago

Capture One in terms of functionality. But same s*itty pay model.

wentin• 4 years ago

Adobe Document Cloud has some nice features that are unique in the market, and are worthy being paid features. But sadly they are hidden under a sea of very basic feature like this one, totally unworthy of a paid feature — this make the good feature less noticeable.

One of the paid feature that I really like is fluid PDF on mobile screen. Most PDF is not very readable on mobile screen, it needs pan and zoom. The fluid feature make the layout become more HTML-like and fluid, and adapt to mobile screen size. That is a feature to monetize. not rotating pages!

hazelnut-tree• 4 years ago

This story is unclear and possibly misleading from the posted image. There are three versions of Adobe PDF software:

- Adobe Reader desktop app (free and lets you rotate PDF pages)

- Adobe Pro desktop app (full PDF editing and requires subscription)

- Adobe PDF online (requires a free account and lets you rotate PDF pages: https://www.adobe.com/acrobat/online.html)

You can still rotate PDF pages using the Reader desktop app. However, as other posters have recommended, there are many alternative PDF apps. Avoid Adobe if you can.

open-paren• 4 years ago

*in Acrobat Reader.

There is an online version that requires signing in, but no purchase.

https://adobe.com/acrobat/online/rotate-pdf.html

There are some other tools there as well.

Disclosure: Adobe employee, not in Document Cloud.

netsharc• 4 years ago

I wanted to combine a few PDFs into 1 big one, and I noticed adobe.com offers that for free (but it requires user registration). Now I just remembered that Gimp can open PDFs, and each page would be its own layer. Probablt good enough for some light editing.

Olumde2• 4 years ago

I no longer use Acrobat on Android since an upgrade required permissions to delete any PDF from my phone.

No way San Jose!

kristianp• 4 years ago

What do you recommend on Android? I've been using the Dropbox viewer, but a standalone viewer would be handy.

Olumde2• 4 years ago

I've been using Dropbox too :)

bsder• 4 years ago

Depend on proprietary standards--win stupid prizes.

Same old, same old.

1letterunixname3• 4 years ago

pdfjam on Linux can do it for free. As can Mac.

tambeb• 4 years ago

Microsoft's Edge on Windows lets you annotate and rotate PDFs.

Fire-Dragon-DoL• 4 years ago

There are a bunch of open source software that does this

bearmode3• 4 years ago

This was always the case. Adobe Reader has never had edit capabilities.

This is not new.

Adobe now requires you to purchase a subscription to rotate PDF pages

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