Compare and contrast PDFBox and Adobe PDF

[Rick Gallo <ri...@rsmail.com>]

Hi, Team,
We are looking to Compare and contrast PDFBox and Adobe PDF.

We are a marketing firm that has clients for which we send out mail that has to be exact.

To improve a process of proofing these documents, we asked someone to write some code, which uses java to extract pdf pages to another pdf file.

Adobe is seen as the industry standard, but the developer wants to use PDFBox. I'm ok with it, but we have to convince our CEO, who is hyper-sensitive to possible errors.

So, I'm looking for opinions that compare Adobe PDF to PDFBox.  Are they identical?  Is one better than another?  From a few forums, PDFBox shouldn't be used for brand new docs, but all of our docs will be existing.  I also saw a forum where PDFBox created some funky characters. A while back, someone in our group used Microsoft PDF which also created some funk.

We really want to use the new code because it will speed up our process, but if one job goes haywire I may lose my job, or if the client leaves us, a good chunk of us will be laid off.  I'm not sure if I can convince our CEO that Adobe PDF and PDFBox are equal, at least.

Your thoughts?

At Your Service,

Rick Gallo
Pre-Print Manager
Redstone Print and Mail, Inc.
(925) 335-9090 Office
(888) 779-3884 Fax
rickg@rsmail.com

Re: Compare and contrast PDFBox and Adobe PDF

[Tilman Hausherr <TH...@t-online.de>]

Hi,

Adobe is always the "Gold Standard". So PDFBox is never "better" than Adobe.

Extracting PDF pages and recombine works nicely except for structure 
tree elements (for "accessible" PDFs), see recent issues in JIRA. 
Another weirdness  is splitting PDF when resources are not on the page 
level.
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/PDFBOX-3428
This is usually not the case and the javadoc mentions a workaround, but 
who reads javadocs...

But if that problem happens you will see it, if some human looks at the 
output.

Tilman

Am 18.12.2018 um 02:17 schrieb Rick Gallo:
>
> Hi, Team,
>
> We are looking to Compare and contrast PDFBox and Adobe PDF.
>
> We are a marketing firm that has clients for which we send out mail 
> that has to be exact.
>
> To improve a process of proofing these documents, we asked someone to 
> write some code, which uses java to extract pdf pages to another pdf file.
>
> Adobe is seen as the industry standard, but the developer wants to use 
> PDFBox. I’m ok with it, but we have to convince our CEO, who is 
> hyper-sensitive to possible errors.
>
> So, I’m looking for opinions that compare Adobe PDF to PDFBox. Are 
> they identical?  Is one better than another?  From a few forums, 
> PDFBox shouldn’t be used for brand new docs, but all of our docs will 
> be existing.  I also saw a forum where PDFBox created some funky 
> characters. A while back, someone in our group used Microsoft PDF 
> which also created some funk.
>
> We really want to use the new code because it will speed up our 
> process, but if one job goes haywire I may lose my job, or if the 
> client leaves us, a good chunk of us will be laid off.  I’m not sure 
> if I can convince our CEO that Adobe PDF and PDFBox are equal, at least.
>
> Your thoughts?
>
> At Your Service,
>
> Rick Gallo
>
> Pre-Print Manager
>
> Redstone Print and Mail, Inc.
>
> (925) 335-9090 Office
>
> (888) 779-3884 Fax
>
> rickg@rsmail.com
>