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An honest take on ReflowPDF vs Acrobat after a month

4 replies · 538 views

10 rep

Since I came from Acrobat I keep getting asked if it's a replacement, so here's the unsentimental version.

Acrobat is a tank. Twenty years of features, forms, redaction, prepress, the works. If your job needs all of that, it's not going anywhere. But its actual text editing is box-overlay, you're shoving fixed text frames around and the moment you add a line everything stops fitting. ReflowPDF's whole point is the opposite, the content reflows, so editing a paragraph feels like editing a document instead of defusing a bomb.

Where it loses to Acrobat right now: it's newer and smaller, so there are corners that just aren't built yet. I'm not doing complex form work here. But for the 90% of my week that's 'change this copy and re-export clean', I haven't opened Acrobat since. And $10 vs whatever Adobe charges now is not a close call.

4 Replies

10 rep

This matches my read. I'd add the accessibility angle since it's mine: Acrobat will let you tag a PDF but it's a manual slog after the fact. Here the tagged structure comes out of the export already, UA-1 and PDF/A, which for me is the difference between an afternoon and five minutes. That alone moved a chunk of my work over.

Vlad K.Staff
32 rep

Appreciate the balanced write-up, including the parts that sting. The 'corners not built yet' line is fair, redaction and full form authoring are the two we hear about most. We're not pretending to be Acrobat, we're trying to be the thing you reach for first and only fall back to Acrobat when you really need the tank.

5 rep

Redaction's the one I'd vote up if you're taking votes. Real redaction, not draw-a-black-box. Otherwise no complaints I haven't already filed.

10 rep
OP

yeah fair, thanks for the perspective