Limit usage of Adobe Professional vs PDF-XChange Pro

[Burdarper]

Hello everybody,
within our company we are using PDF-XChange Pro on every device for ages (glob. World pack <75.000 license) and adobe pro if the respective person requested it in the past.

Since the colleagues themselves never think of returning a licence if they don't use it or admitting that they don't need something when asked, I now want to withdraw all adobe Pro licences and force the colleagues through a new approval workflow.

When I inform them of my intention, I would like to tell them the advantages of PDF-Xchange Pro, or rather I would need to know which reasons are valid to actually have to use adobe pro.
So let me ask you briefly:
What use cases justify the use of adobe pro when PDF-XChange Pro is available on all devices?

Unfortunately, I'm just the IT guy in charge of software distribution and licence allocation and I don't work with PDFs very much.
So I can't really judge whether a request for adobe Pro is actually valid.

I hope I get a short unbiased answer here.

Greetings.

[Stefan - PDF-XChange]

Hello Burdarper,

Welcome to our forums!
I presume the above post is a request for both us and other forums users to share their opinion on cases where such a use might be justified.

From my point of view - you should be able to do anything PDF related to local files with our products.
We do not yet have a collaboration tool, but apart from this or other features that would need a server to work - we can offer anything 99.9% of all users would need.

And for some of the "server related" features that 'A' can offer - we have alternatives - e.g. we have integration with DocuSign - so if someone wants to send a document out for signing - you can get DocuSign envelopes and use those, instead of paying for the similar service 'A' offers. We do not earn any commission from DocuSign, and I have no overview on what their related fees are for the service they provide.

Kind regards,
Stefan

[FelixPDF]

Hello everybody,
within our company we are using PDF-XChange Pro on every device for ages (glob. World pack <75.000 license) and adobe pro if the respective person requested it in the past.

Since the colleagues themselves never think of returning a licence if they don't use it or admitting that they don't need something when asked, I now want to withdraw all adobe Pro licences and force the colleagues through a new approval workflow.

When I inform them of my intention, I would like to tell them the advantages of PDF-Xchange Pro, or rather I would need to know which reasons are valid to actually have to use adobe pro.
So let me ask you briefly:
What use cases justify the use of adobe pro when PDF-XChange Pro is available on all devices?

Unfortunately, I'm just the IT guy in charge of software distribution and licence allocation and I don't work with PDFs very much.
So I can't really judge whether a request for adobe Pro is actually valid.

I hope I get a short unbiased answer here.

Greetings.

One BIG advantage of adobe over PDF-XChange is, that you are able to copy (CTRL+C) previously inserted images into a PDF, and to insert it into another application. This is a big problem for all our editors, and results in a lot of frustration.

Interesting, Adobe is quite on track and willing to help/fix problems (such as this one) that are reported back ...

[Stefan - PDF-XChange]

Hello FelixPDF,

We can copy images between files just as easily.
If they are base content items you might need to switch to another tool in the Editor, but it is definitely possible.
If you have a sample where you can not copy between files - can we please have the test documents so that we can check this on our side?

Kind regards,
Stefan

[Burdarper]

Hello,
thank you for your time and efforts.

After interviewing some more users /based on your replies) I feel like the vast majority requested adobe pro because they need OCR functions or have to combine multiple PDFs to one / switch page order and so on.

Maybe those functions were missing "a decade ago" so some kind of internal rumour was spread like : "If you need xyz, then you have to use adobe Pro" . And this was never questioned over time; maybe.

[David.P]

That's funny, Burdarper -- what you mention are basic functions that PDF-XChange Editor has been able to do for decades, and way better so than Ad0be Acr0bat.

I tell users and IT reps normally that PDF-XChange Editor is 10 to 100 times faster than Ad0be Acr0bat in many respects, for example with large document display, search and thumbnail navigation and handling. I won't even begin to list the hundreds of features and aspects where PDF-XChange Editor totally blows Adobe Acrobat out of the water.

Once you've used PDF-XChange Editor any length of time, you'll realize what a wretched, buggy and slow bloatware Ad0be Acr0bat has become.

Lots of entertaining reading on this topic can also be found here:
https://bit.ly/Acrobat-Uservoice-Interface

Best regards
David

[Stefan - PDF-XChange]

Hello David.P,

That is an interesting read you've shared there

@Burdarper - from the features your users have listed - maybe only the OCR in the form we offer it now was missing.
In the past we were only offering an OCR engine that could add an invisible layer of text on top of the existing images, but was unable to remove pixels and replace them with visible text. This is now possible with the Enhanced OCR engine included in the Editor Plus / Pro.

So for all of your users who ask for such features you can now freely recommend our products.

Here is a KB article on how to use the EOCR:
https://www.pdf-xchange.com/knowledgeba ... -performed

Kind regards,
Stefan

[Burdarper]

Hello everybody,

just to keep you updated:
I cancelled all 150 adobe pro subscriptions and from first of March everybody who previously used adobePro had to use PDFXchange pro.

After announcing that in february the resistance was huge of course, but since nobody was able to deliver a solid reason (besides I don´t want to change my habits ... ) to stay with adobe they are working with PDFXchange Pro now.

After two month have passed without any complaints the activity can be considered successful.

I wanted to say thank you for encouriging me to take that step.

Greetings

[Stefan - PDF-XChange]

Hello Burdarper,

Many thanks for the kind words!
Glad to hear that the transition has been smooth and that your users are liking our products now!

Kind regards,
Stefan

[Mathew]

I'm a big fan of PDF-XChange. For me, the only thing I used Acrobat for was converting color markups on scanned documents to mixed raster compression. Since PXE added the option to compress to MRC, I've not found the need to use Acrobat any more, although honestly the MRC compression in Acrobat is still better (smaller files, better image quality.)

I've attached samples, both compressed to "medium". The Acrobat version is 1/3 the size and has better readability for the colored markups IMO.

MRC_Adobe_Optimized.pdf

MRC_PXE_Optimized.pdf

Here's a detail from Acrobat's algorithm:

image.png

Here from PXE:

image(1).png

[Vasyl - PDF-XChange]

Hi Mathew.

Can you provide the original doc so we can reproduce the MRC issue?

Cheers.

[Paul - PDF-XChange]

Hi, Mathew,

we raised a ticket for this, for your reference it is RT#6901: MRC compression in Acrobat is still better.

[Mathew]

Can you provide the original doc so we can reproduce the MRC issue?

Here's the file from the scanner:

img20220223_12372621.pdf

[Stefan - PDF-XChange]

Hello Mathew,

Thanks for the sample file. I've just added it to the ticket so that our devs can check it out!

Kind regards,
Stefan