Adobe Acrobat is Evil

I probably don’t need to tell people that Adobe Acrobat is evil, but I’ll tell you anyway. Adobe Acrobat is evil!

So I needed to sign a very important document, just needed to edit a single document. PDFs already are a bad format that I dislike a lot, but they’re so ubiquitous that I can’t do anything about that. Editing them should be as simple as anything else, and yet… that’s not how the world works, so you have to get specialized software.

I didn’t happen to have anything installed, so I went and tried to get the most common one… And then of course I discovered that Adobe Acrobat is evil, just evil. First off, when you go to download it, it comes attached with fucking MCAFEE ANTIVIRUS. It’s included in a super tiny checkbox that you have to click BEFORE downloading the file unlike 99% of every program where they try and sneak in the bloatware during the installation itself. I very nearly got McAfee malware’d straight onto my laptop. Yuck.

If that’s not the worst thing, you can’t even edit PDFs with this stupid program, I discovered. You can’t even export files into other filetypes. Only way to do that stuff is to pay a fucking subscription fee, because I guess they assume people edit so many PDFs on a weekly basis that $15 a month is reasonable?

No, they realize that subscription fees are just a great way to do predatory pricing because people forget to cancel their free trials and then the cancellation process is such a hassle that they end up sticking with it for 2-3 months. And in that time they probably edit 2-3 PDFs max.

Adobe Acrobat is evil, truly.

But worst of all? It turns out you can just edit PDFs with Microsoft Word, anyway. I didn’t need any new program. Sigh.

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I write a lot of rambling rants about technology and websites. Read this one about Box Office Mojo, or about RSS Feeds.