In AEC work we’ve moved almost exclusively to a competing PDF tool called Blubeam, which is proprietary but very worth the price, with tools for scaling, dimensioning, and producing material takeoffs from PDF drawings. Much of what you’d use Acrobat for in a more typical office environment are absent or limited, though.

I'm not sure this true - PDF is an open standard. The issue isn't generally with layout and reproducibility - a good PDF maker and a good reader will give you an accurate representation of how it looks on all devices once the PDF is created.

Certainly there isn't a dedicated FOSS tool for make PDFs; Libre Office and Inkscape do a decent job but not perfect which may be what you're referring to. And they're not dedicated PDF makers plus the real problem is building fillable forms and signature tools.

But there is a proprietary alternative called Master PDF that is a dedicated and supports all the PDF standard features I believe; one perpetual license is $80 compared to Adobe subscription based charging. I'm not aware of other options myself but they may exist. But it's a viable alternative to the "adobe tax".

Also of course if you have Office 365 from Microsoft, you can use Word to export docs to PDF reliably (in my experience). Obviously as far as you can get from FOSS, but it is an option on Linux via web browser if you have it from work for example; at least you don't have to pay Adobe but it's scraping the bottom of the barrel for this threat I know!

There are a few other PDF editors that are cheaper, but they don’t have the same features. PDF seems like something that has outlived its purpose. There has to be other document formats that provide a similar or better experience and prevents alteration.

Building off of this, the PDF standard supports all sorts of craziness. It can have embedded math and logic similar to excel files, to the point there's templates available for banks which will automatically calculate entire loans (including weird ones like balloon mortgages and variable interest rate stuff) without leaving Adobe Reader, and the recent Doom PDF and Linux PDF projects exploit the fact that pdfs support embedded javascript.

There's also an actual market for enterprise PDF templates like the banking ones I described with automatic calculations and whatnot. So some people literally make their living selling PDFs to businesses that businesses actually use

it won’t look the way you expect it to when someone opens it up in Adobe which their company definitely has.

That sounds like a problem between them and Adobe tbh

I don't know how it stacks up price-wise, but I'd argue Bluebeam is a far superior PDF editing program. It even covers some word processing, Illustrator, and some PowerPoint adjacent things.

That being said, I can't see it as practical for the average consumer.

not true. dont oay adobe so more pdfs will look like the user intended. dont fall adobe scams like weird functions that should be in a pdf anyways. pdfs created with masterpdfeditor look exactly as intended. so, again: no, adobe is a scam. always has been.

How does Sumatra fall into all of this? It’s an open source version