Native Mac alternative to Adobe Reader Pro

Question

Hello people,
I'm looking after an alternative to Adobe Acrobat Reader Pro, through which i can create custom forms with fixed text and text fields (that not only can accept text input but in some cases show possible options from drop down menus) kinda like a smart PDF form.
I don't like using Adobe products at all and pretty much have a grudge on Adobe. The alternative doesn't really even need PDF support but if it can export to PDF that might be a plus. I use PDFPen Pro but that doesn't do what i explained above.
Was also looking at Filemaker (yes i know it's a DB app) in a possible conjunction with PDF Manipulator plugin but i don't think that will help me do what i need to accomplish. The end goal would be to create a dozen PDF, or whatever format, forms that can simplify the work in my small business, since we do work with a lot of repetitive documents that need change only in some small parts.
Do you guys have any idea?
Thanks

Answer 1

There's no such thing as Adobe Reader Pro. There is Adobe Acrobat, which creates PDFs and Adobe Reader which reads PDFs. Finding an alternative to Acrobat might be difficult in that Adobe owns the PDF format. PDFPen is the only one I've heard of, but I'm not really in the market for that software.
If you are looking for another format to use in-house, that may be possible, but I don't know of any.
I have worked in the Air Force for over 20 years. In that time I've seen them go through various iterations of Form creation and filling software. Every time I've had to ask myself, "why don't we just use Acrobat?" I don't know if it is a licensing thing, but we license all of Microsoft, so I'm not sure that's the answer.
An in-house database solution would likely work for the small number of forms you need. So would Mail Merge in Word. You can create fill-in forms in Word, also. It will do dropdown menu selections, check boxes, etc.