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PDF documents have become commonplace and for most of us are now essential tools of everyday work. As a concept, they certainly have merits, the main one being that they allow documents to be distributed with high fidelity entirely independent from the environment (hardware and software) that was used to create them.
Unfortunately, the Acrobat story is yet another example of what happens when “suits” take over a creative software company like Adobe (ruining products other than Acrobat too, such as, following the Aldus takeover, PageMaker). Somehow, as certain management types take over, products become overpriced, bloated and seem to resemble malware ever more closely (littering all over the registry and in other places, hiding stuff and taking over control of your system).
Over time, the Acrobat software has become very bloated indeed, not just in terms of storage space, but also in its demands on processor cycles and memory. But what really infuriates me is the arrogance that the user is subjected to. End user licences are bordering on the psychopathic, but even worse is the fact that users are treated with contempt, rather than as valued customers.
A few years ago, I installed Acrobat 7 and it just decided it should put icons on my desktop that I hadn’t asked for, as well as add items to the startup sequence of my system, again something I did not ask for. That might sound bad enough, but when I disabled a service, I found it had re-enabled it without even asking me! When I later updated the software at some point, it simply recreated the infuriating desktop icons I had manually removed after the original install and reinstalled an application in the startup sequence! Acrobat also had become hideously slow, consumed memory like there were no tomorrow and I frequently experienced bugs. If that was not enough, their customer service was terrible. I found later versions even worse.
In the end, I did the only reasonable thing and I banned Adobe software altogether from my computers. That includes Photoshop and PageMaker, admittedly iconic packages, but I have found perfectly good alternatives (PaintShop Photo Pro and PagePlus in case you wonder). Instead of Acrobat, I have purchased PDF-XChange Pro. It comes at a fraction of the cost of Acrobat, is lean and above all fast, does not behave like malware and generates excellent quality PDFs.
There are several alternatives to Acrobat these days and in my opinion every individual and business should consider them. Having tried several of them, my experience is that the entirely free ones are not a true match for the commercial offerings, but a product like PDF-XChange is at least as good as Acrobat, and better in many respects.
Only by voting with their feet will consumers change the obnoxious practices of some of these companies. In most cases, there is a real choice and we should exercise it - it's really in our long term interest.
