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I think Abbyy kills it, they really are Enterprise grade, unlike Adobe who like to claim they are but crash more often than Taki Inoue ever did.

For standard grade I find masterpdf kills Adobe almost all around, including OCR and search/index, and it lets you edit pdf elements more easily than editing a word document. Not FOSS, but I found it well worth my$50 or whatever it was, esp compared to Adobe and Foxit. Crashes way, way less than Adobe as well, can also get a linux version, which you can't with Adobe.

I have a full Adobe DC license supplied by work, but the only time I use Adobe by choice is if I want the outrageously useful and uniquely packaged functionality provided by the Autobookmark (Evermap) or Debenue plugins, but tbh they only really do things that Adobe should have baked in anyway if they weren't trying to gouge you on basic functionality they lock up (eg create bookmarks based on a font, page position and a regex, and then make TOC from bookmarks - lets you create a TOC for a pdf that has none and you don't have the native, for instance).

I've been doing a deep dive in to pdf format for some time now.



I'll check it out. I haven't tried Abbyy yet but have tried a few others, and none of them unfortunately came close to the capabilities of Adobe Acrobat. I don't like Adobe Acrobat because I primarily use Linux, but do keep a Windows VM or partition around to scan documents.




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