PhantomPDF doesn’t do anything that Acrobat doesn’t cover. To put it another way: The areas that PhantomPDF overlaps with Acrobat are about even. Character spacing was very subtly different, but didn’t affect anything significant like line breaks in my tests. Line spacing can vary significantly, which could prove frustrating when precise layout is important, such as a template or newsletter. Documents that use common typefaces such as Times New Roman tend to look worse because Adobe’s software substitutes their high-end version of Times for the comparatively low-end version that is pre-installed in Windows. The PhantomPDF printer driver has other quirks on its own. Watch the second line of text in the paragraph, and the kerning on the letters. This makes its current incarnation more of a novelty than a useful tool.

However, the advanced editor is very difficult to use with precision, it cannot create CMYK objects, nor can it convert RGB objects to CMYK. At first glance, this seems like something that might be useful if you need to fix a PDF right now, you don’t have the original document, and it was due at the printer yesterday.

The PDF/E conversion option is especially puzzling, considering that PhantomPDF doesn’t support embedding the 3d models or dynamic content that the PDF/E format was created for in the first place.Īnother example is the “Advanced Editing” mode. The best the PhantomPDF printer driver can offer is PDF/A1-b support, but forget about CMYK or image resolution controls. There is an automatic conversion option, but if you don’t like the result there is no way to fix it. PhantomPDF can recognize and validate PDF/A (archival), PDF/X (press), and PDF/E (engineering) documents. The most prominent example of this has to do with working with standards-compliant PDF documents. The advanced editor looks fancy, but isn’t all that functional.

Foxit phantom vs adobe acrobat pro