So I had complained on Twitter about what it was like to use Acrobat Pro for production, and the Adobe asked for my feedback. I’ll try to give you some here.

My background is as a motion designer (for over 30 years) so I’m very familiar with photoshop, illustrator, after effects , 3D programs, etc. not really a print guy, but am helping out with a non-profit here in Athens, Ga.

What I’ve been doing is checking (and fixing) ads that come in for this non-profit’s publications. They usually arrive as PDFs, some image-based, some vector, some hybrid. The problems I encounter are usually because of their clients inability to follow instructions. There are a lot of problems with ads being the wrong size, or being needlessly complex with too many clipping masks and the like, making it hard to dig into a file to fix things. Some of them have weird old-school crop marks or registration marks, or other needless nonsense.

When I go to “editPdf” I find it needlessly complicated to crop, or enlarge artboards. The workflow appears to be to eyeball the initial crop rectangle (inaccurately). Then hit enter to call up the dialog box where you’re expected to enter offsets in text fields for top, bottom, left, and right in an attempt to achieve the crop area you want.

Let’s say I want the ad to be cropped to 4.625 x 10 inches. I have to fudge each of these 4 textfields to reach the number I want. Why can’t I just enter what size I want, and maybe numerically enter an offset to the document bounds to position this frame? Why can’t I see a better representation of what I’m doing?

Also, why can’t I crop an image larger? Using those document size fields at the bottom of the dialog box is needlessly redundant.

My other gripe is how hard (or impossible, in some cases) it is to dig down into several layers of clipping paths in order to manipulate an object (a path, an image). There’s no layer browser like in illustrator, photoshop, etc. You can manually (no numeric feedback) crop photos smaller, but not larger (increasing the size of its clipping mask).

Frustrating. Can’t help but think there should be better tools to edit PDFs, especially from Adobe.