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Question

Edit vs. Comment in Acrobat

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
January 26, 2022
3 replies
2578 views

Almost daily, I find myself having to explain to Acrobat users that the Edit and Comment tools are not "exactly like in MS Word" and that Acrobat is not a layout app. Once they get that, I have to go into how to use the Comment tools –other than the "yellow bubble" which is the only one they seem to locate and somewhat understand.

While at times it's great to have the ability to edit a PDF, it's also a huge problem in regulated inveronments: Editing a PDF in Acrobat Pro does not leave traces (of the kind Word generates) and that is very challenging. Also editing an editor's comments does not leave traces; in fact, such edited edits still look like coming from the original editor. Mad.

Are the users at fault? Lacking training? Perhaps, to a degree. Mostly, however, these are UI mistakes that Adobe has never either addressed or corrected (nor have they addresed this: a huge number of users referreing to Acrobat as "Adobe", which Adobe does not seem to mind... Confusion ensues).

Adobe needs to address and minimize the confusion between Editing and Comenting a PDF, and clarify the use of the Comment tools for all using Adobe, the app, you know, Acrobat.

This topic has been closed for replies.

try67

Community Expert

Regarding the last point: That's just how people remember things. You can't really "fight" it. Many people call copying machines Xerox-machines, although Xerox is a company with many other products...

I think a bigger issue is the confusion between Acrobat and Reader, and that Adobe can help with, but they are in fact making it worse by renaming Reader as "Acrobat Reader" some years ago and very recently making it even worse by combining the installation for both products and adding features that only work in Acrobat to the Reader UI, causing the users to believe they can do things in the application which they can't, not unless they pay for them.

See the recent influx of people complaining about not being able to rotate pages in Reader any longer. It happened because Adobe changed the UI and the command to rotate a page via the right-click menu now actually tries to rotate it (not possible in Reader) instead of just rotate its view (which is still possible, but hidden under a sub-menu).

H

Heather5DAD

Participant

This is true which all becomes very confusing to me a regular person who is
trying to reuse a template or such . For some one like me who doesn’t know
how to do the many different things like create templates of my own or make
a form print bigger then the tiny size it downloads as it is all very
confusing and I would appreciate it being much easier especially for the
price of ten dollars a month i mean i can just go buy documents from
document now and do all this but I remain loyal to adobe and acrobat of
which i also were yes two in the same --
Heather Dawn

Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com

Legend

Yes, it is confusing to most users what the difference is between truly editing a PDF (changing its content) and adding comments and editorial markups.

When Acrobat was conceived and developed 30+ years ago, we never in our wildest dreams planned for users to be able actually change the document! We were only trying to develop a solution for a real problem back then: how to get a file, made on one computer and operating system, to be viewable on another computer with a different OS, without the original software that created the PDF, and without the fonts from the original computer. Acrobat's capabilities were originally geared for the printing/prepress industry, but soon the idea of using it for office documents was promoted.

I think those of us involved back then did a tremendous job creating this revolutionary software and file format. It really did change how all of us work and communicate.

But it might be time for a new form of PDF — PDF 3, that would perform more like what people expect today. We now expect collaboration software like Google Docs that can be viewed and edited with any digital device. Ol' Acrobat is kinda stuck in the last century.

I have no idea if Adobe is planning for something like that, but why not suggest your ideas at www.Acrobat.UserVoice.com? That's where Adobe staff listen to its customers.

|    Bevi Chagnon   |  Designer, Trainer, & Technologist for Accessible Documents ||    PubCom |    Classes & Books for Accessible InDesign, PDFs & MS Office |

gary_sc

Community Expert

Hi Si-bone,

You're speaking to the choir here on all of these issues.

This forum is mostly populated by folks like yourself who are willing to spend a bit of time each day trying to help folks as you seem to be doing. Almost daily there are folks who ask why isn't the Edit working properly, or the classic "My adobe is broke!"

As far as renaming, what would you expect to see. Remove the word Edit and replace it with what Partial Editing Capabilities? 😄

I do not know what platform you're on but this year, when I look at Acrobat Pro DC on my Mac I see "Adobe Acrobat."

I seriously do not think there's any hope for them to mend their ways...

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