ArtCraft used AI to reverse engineer and rebuild the Adobe suite and Office apps with supposedly close to 1:1 feature parity. I have just seen several social media posts about this, and have not downloaded or installed them.

Adobe Suite - https://getartcraft.com/apps

Repos for Adobe and Office - https://github.com/storytold/craft-launcher

In GitHub are repos for Office apps. They don't have them linked on their website.

I do wonder how long these will stay up and what the legality is.

Haven't tried it yet, but as someone using Adobe products since the late 90s the modern versions are generally terrible. They quit focusing on their actual end users a long time ago and shifted to document management and enterprise level applications as well as "AI" to boost their stock price. I'd be far more interested in someone vibe coding Photoshop from around 15 years ago.

It's a cool experiment, but there's already cheap to free alternatives out there that are just as good.

Been struggling with my PDF readers. Hated Acrobat when I signed up for that a few months ago. Now, PDF Expert, which I've been using for several years, has started giving me trouble. Hopefully this PDF Craft works without the bloat.

91AggieLawyer said:

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Been struggling with my PDF readers. Hated Acrobat when I signed up for that a few months ago. Now, PDF Expert, which I've been using for several years, has started giving me trouble. Hopefully this PDF Craft works without the bloat.

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There's not a good PDF product in Mac that I can find. I'm currently using PDF Expert and for the life of me can't find the simple "email this document" feature. For some bizarre reason Mail isn't an option in the Share menu so apparently you can't email a document from the app. If I'm wrong please tell me so I can get on with my life.

I've also used Nitro which really good in Windows but not nearly as good in Mac. It's a frustrating hole in Mac.

I've been using PDFGear and am pretty happy with it. There's another one out there that you can "self-host", but I don't remember the name and it seemed too much of a headache when PDFGear has been getting the job done.

I'm playing around with Gridcraft in Fedora and so far I'm liking what I see...gonna try CADCraft at some point to see if that works, because God knows the open source options (LibreCAD, QTCAD) suck.

They keep saying these apps are written in Rust. How does that compare to the OpenOffice type apps that are/were written in Java and needed the Java runtime to work? I never liked them -- on either Windows or Mac.

That's a good question. I don't know, and honestly, it didn't occur to me to ask. Here's a link I found online. Haven't read it yet.

https://blog.jetbrains.com/rust/2025/08/01/rust-vs-java/

Rust is compiled to a native app, so no virtual machine necessary like Java. In practice it's a touch slower than C for complex code because it produces safer code but can be orders of magnitude faster than Java.

First (quick) impressions of the PDF app. I used it tonight for things I use this type of app for.

1. It doesn't seem to be sucking a TON of memory. However, my (Brave) browser is doing that all by itself. I'm hoping a Mac upgrade soon, with a ton more RAM, will fix that.

2. It seems to do most of what I need -- at least on first glance. The interface is clunky to say the least. Adding text is REALLY clunky. However, I have my PDF reader in half of my side monitor so that may be part of the issue.

3. It doesn't seem like you're able to get rid of the side ribbon if you want to do anything like edit, insert/delete/merge pages. Due to limited monitor real estate -- and my monitors are 32" so not exactly small -- that's an issue. Maybe I'm missing something here.

4. Nothing has crashed so far but I haven't done a great deal. I've opened PDFs that were created and edited in other apps, edited them, printed, and saved as multiple times. No hang ups.

LOYAL AG said:

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91AggieLawyer said:

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Been struggling with my PDF readers. Hated Acrobat when I signed up for that a few months ago. Now, PDF Expert, which I've been using for several years, has started giving me trouble. Hopefully this PDF Craft works without the bloat.

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There's not a good PDF product in Mac that I can find. I'm currently using PDF Expert and for the life of me can't find the simple "email this document" feature. For some bizarre reason Mail isn't an option in the Share menu so apparently you can't email a document from the app. If I'm wrong please tell me so I can get on with my life.

I've also used Nitro which really good in Windows but not nearly as good in Mac. It's a frustrating hole in Mac.

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I really like Sejda PDF on my Mac. I have a full Adobe subscription and use Acrobat, but I keep a Sejda subscription active as well because it'll let me do some thing Acrobat won't. I think i've been paying around $65 a year.

It is a wildly different user interface, so there is a little bit of a learning curve.

what is everyone doing with PDFs that they need all these features for? I guess I don't have a use case for anything but reading and printing them...?

CapCity12thMan said:

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what is everyone doing with PDFs that they need all these features for? I guess I don't have a use case for anything but reading and printing them...?

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Handling real estate contract negotiations, is pdf and signature heavy. Especially since you have two agents getting e-signatures from their respective clients. Adobe makes it a PITA to combine documents with signatures and get the second set of signatures. Third party signing software has fixed most of this, but in real world applications sometimes you need to combine and Adobe has too many roadblocks. Sejda doesn't GAF. It could replace my Acrobat usage completely, but I have a creative subscription for photoshop and illustrator. Those overpriced subscriptions might be going away for me with the power of Ai available now.

CapCity12thMan said:

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what is everyone doing with PDFs that they need all these features for? I guess I don't have a use case for anything but reading and printing them...?

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Just to name a few things:

-- edit (add/fill in text)
-- sign
-- merge (take 2 or more files and make 1)
-- extract (remove pages from 1 file and create another)
-- reorder pages
-- delete pages and save

I use PDFs daily, professionally, for avocation, and for personal stuff.

91AggieLawyer said:

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I use PDFs daily, professionally, for avocation, and for personal stuff.

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sending a lot of cease and desist letters in your free time?

yeah fair enough it just seems like we are forcing technology into an antiquated paper process instead of the other way around. Everything I do and use had moved to Docusign and this stuff is a non issue. In fact we are likely moving soon to the eSignature feature within Google Docs - its all built in. If you are on the Google Workspace platform versus MS Office I highly recommend looking into it and it might save you some energy and time.

Mat Lanticus said:

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91AggieLawyer said:

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I use PDFs daily, professionally, for avocation, and for personal stuff.

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sending a lot of cease and desist letters in your free time?

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Responding to them, mostly!!

Most -- or actually, pretty much all -- of my music stuff is now in PDF. I'll bring PDF charts in to ForScore, etc. but often before that, I need to make some edits. Often the edits are just simple page reconfigurations but other times I need to put some fairly heavy (text) notes on there. I play pit percussion at church and cover multiple instruments. A lot of times I have different scores for Percussion I, II, Timpani, etc. In the old days, it was literal cut and paste with scissors and tape. Now, its "go to *** on next page" in bold print or something like that.

If/when I play keys, well, don't even ask. That can be a nightmare (both for me and the congregation, incidentally)!