I’m trying to convert a heap of documents into a single PDF. Acrobat 9 is crapping out for some reason, but I can always fall back onto PDF-Xchange and Office2PDF by Tracker Software, which my company decided to install instead of Acrobat. I say “fall back onto” in the same sense that you would “fall back onto” a bed of nails. I got Acrobat proper a while back because of the following problems, which I’m now faced with again.
- The Add File dialog only lets you add one file at a time, unless it’s feeling kind, which it usually isn’t.
- The dialog cannot be resized from being a little box in the center of the screen, so you keep having to use the scroll bar to see the full path of the files.
- When creating PDFs, the program looks for the first period character in the filename, and truncates the name of the resulting PDF at that point, even though it is perfectly valid to use periods in the middle of Windows filenames. This means you may end up with multiple PDF files with the same name, or worse, a stream of documents with a simple incrementing number. Then you have to open each one to see which one it is.
- Poorly-formatted (to the extent that it’s hard to read) help files, which don’t interlink. You have to open the right one.
- What’s the difference between “PDF-Tools”, “Office2PDF”, “PDF-Xchange”, and “PDF-Saver”? Answer is in the help files.
- Current installed version, released in 2008, cannot handle Office 2007 ‘.docx’ or ‘.xlsx’ files.
- Conversion doesn’t run in the background, so progress dialog keeps surfacing and stealing focus from whatever else you’re doing, such as writing a blog post about how much some POS software sucks.
It’s also 300 times cheaper than Acrobat Pro 9. It shows, in design, functionality, and how much it royally sucks.
Ah, IT just fixed Acrobat. TF.