Adobe Acrobat has long been the official PDF reader for Mac and it's just about as long since you ever needed it because you're on a Mac. You have Preview. If you want to do more than Preview offers then you have excellent tools like PDFpen. Nonetheless, Acrobat was the app made by Adode, the creator of PDF, and it was powerful. Now it's more powerful: it isn't just a single app anymore,
Adobe Acrobat DC is more like a front door to an entire service that sees you using PDFs across Macs, iOS and more via a new service called Adobe Document Cloud.
If you know Adobe's Creative Cloud service then you've already got the gist: both that CC and this DC are monthly subscriptions that get you access to Adobe software and also provide various tools for sharing and producing documents. Where the centrepieces of the Creative Cloud are doubtlessly Photoshop and Illustrator, with Document Cloud it all hangs on Adobe Acrobat DC.
You have the usual File/Open option to open PDFs but you can also work through a section called Storage. That's very Windows-y with the first option being to browse My Computer. The second is Document Cloud and the third is what will hopefully become a general service. It's called Add Account now and gives you the option of logging in to Microsoft Sharepoint. It also promises that more services are coming; hopefully that will include Dropbox.
Once you have a PDF opened, Acrobat DC is about as powerful an editor as you can imagine. You can write or drag in text, position images, turn portions of the page into weblinks, add objects, add a header, crop the pages, pop on a watermark: if it can physically be done to a PDF, you can do it in Acrobat DC.
Similarly, you can start with a blank sheet and make up a PDF completely within Acrobat DC – but we're struggling to know why you would. If you're used to creating a document in Word and sending it out as a PDF then there's no advantage and there is huge extra complexity doing it al in Acrobat DC instead. If you design PDFs for a living, you're going to be doing that in Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop.
Acrobat DC is remarkable at exporting documents, though. It can turn complex PDFs into Word documents that are fully editable, proper Word-formatted but look just like the original.
PDFpen Pro, an app we've previously recommended, can do a similar thing but the conversion is actually done remotely. Your document, with your permission, is sent to the company's servers, converted and then sent back. It took about the same time but the Word document that came back wasn't as impressive as Acrobat's. It had all the text but every word was struck through: somewhere a formatting detail went wrong. Doubtlessly Acrobat would fail at some too but a local and excellent conversion is handier than a remote and sometimes poorer one.
Traditionally, Acrobat has been a little tiresome next to PDFpen or even Apple's's humble Preview. While we didn't see this during our testing of the new DC applications, the old Acrobat Reader for Mac used to pop up so annoyingly often with updates and bug fixes that initially you'd wish they'd got it right the first time and then eventually you just ignored them all. Adobe Creative Cloud manages updates to the major applications like Photoshop and Illustrator better so hopefully Acrobat will now be quieter.
For although Adobe is referring to this as the Document Cloud, it is really the same service as the Creative Suite uses: you sign in with an Adobe ID and existing CS users automatically have DC too. Maybe we've just reached sign-in overload and it's unfair to pick on Adobe but we do spend longer logging in to services now than we did installing software. It doesn't cheer us when, having schlepped through the process and finally opened the new Acrobat DC, it has another Sign In button at the top of the screen. It cheers us even less when clicking on that button doesn't ask us for our Adobe ID, it just recognises who we are already signed in as. Presumably if you come to Acrobat before signing in then it makes a difference but if software already recognises our accounts, let it recognise our accounts.
It's this friction that gives us most of our pause when considering Adobe Document Cloud but not all. PDF, the format itself, is a rather amazing thing that has been a tremendous boon and benefit as we've moved away from paper and onto online services but we've been moving for two decades. Are we nearly there yet? Adobe Document Cloud feels like a way to hang on to PDF as a major force rather than a transition device and it feels like a way to lock us in to Adobe's world. There is a key difference between having our software tools available wherever we go and having our documents tied up in systems. It's a an area we blur over all the time yet we don't see iCloud Drive as being the same as a locked-in document server, we certainly don't see Dropbox as that.
Just as with iCloud or Gmail, Adobe Document Cloud works best if you dive in head first and adopt it completely. Adobe wants you using Acrobat DC on Macs and iOS and posits a life where all your documents live within its walls on these machines. We had some oddities with the Mobile Sharing – it created an empty copy of one document – but when it works, it is undeniably handy to have all your PDFs in one place.
If it has enough compelling features for you to make it worth moving in to Adobe Document Cloud full time – and especially if you are already subscribing to Adobe Creative Cloud – then go for it. If your needs are more occasional or PDF is just one tool of many that you use, then Document Cloud is like bringing a skyscraper when you just want a hotdog cart.
Adobe Acrobat DC requires OS X 10.9 or later on Macs and iOS 8.0 or higher on iPhones and iPad.
The iOS ones are free on the App Store. For the Mac one, you need to
subscribe via the official site where it will cost you $15 per month for the full Pro app or $13 for a cut down Standard edition that removes the Word and other exporting options. The official site does also have a 30-day trial version and we recommend giving it a spin.
Who is Adobe Acrobat DC for:
Existing Adobe Creative Cloud customers might as well jump as not. That sounds damning but it remains the case that Macs handle PDFs better than PCs so your need for applications to do it is less.
Who is Adobe Acrobat DC not for:
Occasional PDF creators and editors are better off using PDFpen Pro for OS X and if you just find yourself reading an awful lot of PDFs, then stick with Apple's own Preview.
-William Gallagher (
@WGallagher)
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