General Question

[AdAcrobFan1]

Hello Adobe Community, 

I recently started a job that heavily relys using adobe acrobat, specifically the text box feature. For those who have more experience using Adobe software, can someone kidnly explain why it is so difficult and clunky to use the text box function.  Is there a specific reason Adobe choses to do this, and if so why dont they just make their feature similar to what MS Word has done?  To go with this, I have also noticed Adobe seems to generally enjoy burying certain popular features behind 7 different pages (like changing the text size).  What is the reason for this?

Also, how come there are so many gllitches within the acutal program itself.  It feels like I have to reset the software at least once an hour to get it working again.  It feels almost intentional at some points.

Is there someone I can pay off to give me a working Adobe program or does Adobe just hate their custromers and want to see the world burn. 

Let me know 🙂  

[Adam33483910iu4t]

That's a very insightful quesiton Cameron.  I have similar issues with the textbox from time to time.  If you ever get a response please enlighten me.

[try67]

It's important to understand that Acrobat is NOT a word processing application like Word, and should not be used as such. Now, if you clarify which exact "textbox function" you're referring to and what the issues with it are, we might be able to give further advice.

It seems the new version of Acrobat's user interface is extremely buggy. You can disable it via the Options button at the top left corner (Windows) or open the View menu (Mac) and select Disable New Acrobat. See if that helps the issues you've encountered.

[Luke Jennings3]

It appears the people who hired you believe Acrobat is like Word or InDesign, it's not (as already stared) you can expect to make minor edits, like fixing typos or changing numbers, but anything beyond that is not workable. You can tell this to your employer and risk loosing your job, or use a work-around, such as placing the pdf into InDesign and making the edits on top of the existing placed pdf, then opening the placed pdf in Acrobat and deleting the old type (set the opacity of the placed pdf at 50% temporarily for clarity). You can find the font, type size,  spacing and color in Acrobat for a perfect replacement. Export to a new pdf from InDesign. If the needed edits are extensive and involve re-flow, see if you can get a copy of the original file and make the edits there, or save the pdf as text or a Word file and reformat from scratch in InDesign (using style sheets).

[AdAcrobFan1]

Luke, Adobe is worth 240 billion i'm not really asking for a whole lot here.  I just want to be able to add a text box onto a pdf document smoothly.  Also, if you go to the link I provided Adobe is advertising itself as a document editor where I can easily and funtcionally annotate documents.  However, anyone who has used the program knows this is clearly not true.  I am just wondering why

Modify PDF files | Adobe Acrobat

[Thom Parker]

Ignore Luke.

It is important to understand the tools you use for a job, and to use the correct tools in the correct way. In this case you not only need to lean about Acrobat, but about how it fits into your particular document workflow, and the other tools in that workflow. For example, where exactly did the PDFs you work with come from, because they didn't originate in Acrobat.

[AdAcrobFan1]

I have been working with acrobat for six months i have a good understanding on how the application works.  Also the PDFs did originate within the program, I just want to know why they chose to make text boxes so clunky and hard to use.

[Thom Parker]

Which text box function are you referring too?  The content boxes that appear in "Edit PDF" mode or the Text box annotation?  

Also, documents are not composed in Acrobat. Acrobat is used to convert documents from other formats such as Word and Indesign into PDF.  From there Acrobat is used to finish and prepare documents for distribution.   

[AdAcrobFan1]

Why would I need steroids to work in Adobe?

[try67]

They're a spammer, ignore them.

[AdAcrobFan1]

Had me fooled