Acrobat Reader: PDF Converter

What Acrobat Reader is for

Acrobat Reader is Adobe's Android app for opening, reading, filling in, signing and commenting on PDF files. The core reader is free, and the listing says you can open, read, fill in and sign PDFs without a subscription.

Paid tiers add editing, conversion and file tools on top. It suits anyone who receives PDFs by email or from cloud storage and needs to read and send them back from a phone. The listing names students, people signing contracts on the move, and small businesses sending invoices as its main users.

Reading, marking up and commenting on PDFs

Open a PDF and read it at normal size, or switch on Liquid Mode, which reflows the text to fit the width of the display. That avoids panning sideways across a page on a small screen.

Highlight text, add comments, or drop sticky notes onto the document. Once it is marked up, you can share the PDF straight from the app. Students use this for lecture notes and reading packs, and it works the same way for a colleague's draft.

Filling in and signing forms on a phone

Fill & Sign handles PDF forms. You type into the fields, then sign with your finger on the screen. For a form that arrives by email, the whole job of opening, filling, signing and sending back stays inside one app.

Scans from the free Adobe Scan app open here as well. A paper form photographed in Adobe Scan can be filled and signed in the same way as any other PDF.

Opening files from email, cloud storage and scans

The app opens PDFs from your phone's storage, from email attachments, from your browser, and from Google Drive, OneDrive and Dropbox. You can set Acrobat Reader as the default app for PDFs, so tapping a file in email or a browser opens it here.

Sign in with a free Adobe account to store files in Adobe Document Cloud storage and reach them from other devices. The listing says you can read PDFs without an account. Starred files stay near the top for quick access.

Editing, converting and merging with Premium

Acrobat Premium is the paid part of the app, and the listing says it starts with a 7-day free trial. With it you can edit text and images, fix typos and add paragraphs. You can also create a PDF from photos, Microsoft Office files, Google Docs or web pages.

Premium converts PDFs to Word, Excel, PowerPoint or image files, and the listing says fonts and formatting are kept. It merges several PDFs into one file, for example a resume and a cover letter sent together. It also reorders, rotates, deletes, extracts, crops or splits pages, and it compresses a file so it fits an email or upload limit.

Scanned documents can be run through OCR to produce searchable, editable text. Premium can also password-protect a PDF. Files stored in Google Drive can be edited, compressed and exported from inside the app.

AI Assistant and PDF Spaces

AI Assistant is a paid feature, which the listing says is free for a limited time. You can use voice or text prompts, and answers can be read aloud. It can answer questions about a PDF and cite its answers, including information from charts, graphs and tables.

It also generates summaries of PDFs and drafts content such as emails, texts, study notes and blog posts. The listing says the AI features are optional and can be turned off in Preferences. An Adobe Acrobat AI Assistant add-on plan is available to Acrobat Individual customers.

PDF Spaces groups several files in one place so you can work across them, collaborate with others and use AI Assistant over the set. The listing also mentions turning document summaries into podcast-style audio and design tools built on Adobe Express.

Listening to documents on the move

Read-aloud reads PDFs to you. Premium adds higher-quality read-aloud voices. Students can use it to listen to notes instead of reading them on screen.

The listing says PDFs can be listened to through Android Auto for hands-free reading in the car.