lukas,
@lukas@lemmy.haigner.me avatar

Edit: I don’t pirate the mentioned software.

I’d love to use FOSS exclusively, but it’s frankly impossible under certain conditions.

Acrobat is a must. Alternatives such as Evince or their back-end library can’t handle the following situations:

  • Formulars, such as calculating a sum based on the preceding fields.
  • Field formatting, such as appending .00 to a currency amount conditionally upon field unfocus.
  • Everything related to government forms due to the above.
  • Large password protected PDF files.

Besides, if anything is wrong, you’re on the hook for not using Acrobat.

Microsoft Office is a must.

  • OnlyOffice, WPS free as in free beer, and especially LibreOffice can’t handle anything beyond intermediate documents.
  • OnlyOffice and WPS struggle with more advanced features, such as forms.
  • LibreOffice notoriously renders Microsoft Office documents incorrectly in my experience.
  • Everything in LibreOffice except LibreOffice Writer feels unpolished to me, particularly LibreOffice Calc.
  • OnlyOffice supports only few fields.
  • OnlyOffice permits free form input for fields that aren’t.

Adobe is a must.

  • Alternatives don’t integrate as well with each other as Adobe apps.
  • Rendering whatever you have to import that into another app is a slow workflow, compared to Adobe Premiere that embeds Adobe After Effects sequences, for example.
  • Alternatives don’t support scripting sometimes. Scripting is necessary to speed up slow and error-prone manual processes.
  • Adobe has a rich plugin ecosystem, whereas alternatives don’t support plugins at all, or don’t have any notable plugins.
  • Alternatives don’t support Adobe file formats as well as Adobe.

You face similar problems to Adobe with alternatives, such as:

  • Inconsistent keyboard shortcuts.
  • Inconsistent file format support.

Overall, I’d love to, but can’t. FOSS isn’t good enough.

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