Adobe Acrobat Pro DC

Acrobat’s PDF-editing tools reflect Adobe’s expertise in font technology. The controls include adjustments for spacing between words and letters, making it easy to squeeze an extra word into a paragraph without disruption. You can also specify external apps for modifying images.

Acrobat’s interface has an optional thumbnail or bookmark pane on the left and tool pane (not shown here) on the right. When you right-click on the thumbnails, you can specify page numbering and add presentation-style transition effects.

All high-end PDF software lets you add or change the text in a PDF—but only Acrobat “synthesizes” a new digital font from the original typeface of a scanned-in document and uses that font when inserting text, to avoid distracting readers with a modern font mixed in with an obsolete hot-metal one.

Acrobat’s PDF signing service makes it easy to get digital signatures on PDF documents. The signed PDF gets a certificate that pops up an alert if the document gets modified, and a single click verifies the signature through an online verification tool.

Windows and macOS versions of Acrobat Pro DC use an almost identical interface. Here’s part of the Mac version’s menu of built-in tools that can be added to the toolbar in the right-hand pane.

Here’s Acrobat running on an iPad with a list of documents stored in Adobe Document Cloud, with options for sharing available by tapping on a document’s icon.

PDF editing on a tablet is surprisingly simple. Tap once to edit a document, tap twice to select a page element to edit. The editing tools aren’t as rich as the ones in desktop Acrobat, but good enough for all basic editing tasks.

Acrobat on a phone won’t let you edit text, but you can write or draw comments to remind you or collaborators or what needs to be fixed when you open the PDF on a desktop or tablet.

Adobe’s Document Cloud has a clean, spacious interface for managing PDFs online. You can’t edit text or images, but you can rearrange pages and combine files to create a PDF, and you can download any file to open it in desktop Acrobat.

Here’s the only bug we found, which Adobe promises to fix. When you first open a PDF in desktop Acrobat, it creates a thumbnail for the page of recent files. When you edit the PDF, the thumbnail in the Recents list doesn’t change. The highlighted thumbnail is the original thumbnail, and the preview image at the upper right shows the revised PDF. The data that we removed in editing is still visible. This is misleading at best, and a potential security problem at worst.