Using Adobe Acrobat

General Help
#1

So far I am liking Zorin very much. I played around with Lubuntu on an older laptop years ago, but didn’t stick with it. I just installed an nvme drive on my desktop, so I decided to investigate again. In general, I think everything is going very well and I intend to primarily use Zorin on my desktop. I can always boot back to Windows 7 if need be.

There is one Windows application that I used a lot: Adobe Acrobat DC, the full version, not the reader. I was not able to get it up and running with either Wine or Virtual box. I have since searched and found two Linux applications that give me most of the functionality I used in Acrobat: PDF Arranger & PDF Mix Tool. About the only thing missing is the OCR of scanned pages I used in Acrobat. I can always boot back to Windows if needed for that.

I am just curious. Is Adobe Acrobat just a lost cause for working under Linux, or is anyone using this application successfully under Linux?

Thank you to all the workers who have created a neat Linux distro.

Ed

#2

Welcome, evbrown.
While waiting for other responses, I wanted to bring to your attention that the user on this post What rigs are you all running? mentions Adobe products. May be helpful to send them a message and ask for their input.

#3

I would highly recommend:

  1. Okular - but make sure it is the flatpak one you download. Whilst I don’t hold much with flatpak and snapd - I had to uninstall the ‘standard’ one in software channel and install the flatpak version as the standard one was not letting me save Okular archives - this is when you add highligted text or us virtual ‘post-it’ notes for annotation purposes. I’ve used it since the start of Lockdown in another OS as I don’t have Access to Abbyy Fine Reader - it has some useful backends too like reading .odp (Presentation files), all manner of pdf files. Provided the pdf was constructed with OCR capture you can then extract text, images and tables with ease into your Text Processor of Choice.

  2. LIOS (Linux Intelligent OCR Software). Provided it is decent copy, it can extract text fairly accurately - you can even output what you have opened such as a non-ocr file and save out as a text.pdf then run that through Okular.

I am also fortunate to have the last free version of Master pdf Creator that at one point was free for Linux users - but the latest version has to be paid for. I recently had to complete a warranty claim form and was able to remove all the unneeded text in the form such as the ‘hints’ text.

1 Like
#4

Ahh! Think I should have remembered the title! The issue for me trying to run Zorin as a VM in Virtual Box leads to Menu obliteration when scrolling - this is down to VBox only allowing 128 Mb Max (256 Mb with some settings made) which can cause issues. I’m running Virtual Box of other distros and thanks to a helpful member on the old archived forum, if you are having issues in respect of accessing USB even though you have set it up in VB it won’t work until you install

sudo apt install gnome-tools

Once installed you will be able to access USB devices!

#5

Thank you. Two excellent suggestions.
I posted on the Adobe forum and discovered that I have access to all my Acrobat tools on: https://documentcloud.adobe.com/link/home/
I haven’t tried it yet, but it appears to have all the same function I was using on my desktop version of Adobe Acrobat Pro DC. I am sure it will be somewhat slower, but probably not enough to worry about.
Thanks to everyone for the help!

Adobe Acrobat Reader DC