The Difference Between Acrobat Reader and Acrobat "Writer"

© Ugur Akinci

NOTE: Acrobat “Writer” is the informal term with which many technical users refer to “Adobe Acrobat Pro” PDF editor.

This is perhaps elementary but still I get emails and phone calls now and then from readers who are frustrated because their Acrobat won’t “behave properly.”

What they specifically complain about is that they cannot follow the steps I’ve outlined in an article “about Acrobat.”

My first question is: “Are you using Acrobat Reader or Writer?” That usually settles the issue 99% of the time since you need to have Acrobat Pro (also called the “Writer”) to perform the advanced editing and document manipulation techniques that I describe in my articles.

Acrobat Reader (at Version 9 as these lines are written) is free and you can download it from http://get.adobe.com/uk/reader/ or http://www.adobe.com/products/reader/

Acrobat Pro (also at Version 9 as these lines are written), on the other hand, is not free. You have to pay for it. But you can download that too from http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobatpro/

With Acrobat Reader you can only read a PDF document. You cannot manipulate it.

With Acrobat “Writer,” (Pro) on the other hand, you can highlight and make comments on it; export the comments; edit words and sentences; insert and subtract/extract pages; replace and crop pages; compare two documents; measures distances and area on the document; generate accessibility report; save the whole document in MS Word format; and do a dozen other editing and document transformation functions.

With Acrobat 9 Pro EXTENDED, you can even embed a video clip, voice-over, demo, or an interactive quiz right into your PDF file!

If you use PDF documents regularly and would like to comment on them and modify them, it might be worth your while to look into purchasing a copy of Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro. Take advantage of Adobe’s 30 day free trial offer and see if it serves your purposes or not.