The project’s founding ambition was to match Acrobat feature for feature, without the cloud and without the subscription. With version one and three rounds of follow-ups merged, the owner asked the direct question: of what Acrobat charges for, what is left?
The ranking
The manager read the published comparison of Acrobat’s editions against what the app already did. Most of the Standard edition was covered, and text recognition from Pro. What remained, ranked by how much use it would get:
- Protect on save. A password to open, restrictions on printing and copying, and taking protection off again.
- Headers, footers, page numbers, Bates numbers, watermarks.
- Export and create. Pages as images or text, the images inside a file pulled out, and a PDF made from a folder of images.
- Certificate signing. A real digital signature, not just a placed picture of one.
- Compare two PDFs.
- Redaction that truly removes what it covers.
- Compress.
- Batch actions over a folder.
What was ruled out
Signature requests sent to other people, web forms, cloud storage, integrations with office suites, and every AI feature. All of them are either online services or outside the project’s stated non-goals, and none of them belongs in a tool whose promise is that nothing leaves the disk.
The order
The owner’s answer set the schedule in one line: the first three at once, then signing and compare, with redaction and compression fitted in around them. Batch actions were left unordered. Three builders went out that night, each on its own branch in its own working copy, with a reviewer to follow each one.