Adobe Acrobat Pro

Overview

Adobe Acrobat Pro is CMC's tool for working on PDFs rather than just reading them. Adobe Reader — the free viewer most people already have — opens a PDF, fills a form, and adds a comment. Acrobat Pro is the application that edits the text inside a PDF, merges a stack of files into one document, turns a scan into searchable text, permanently removes sensitive content, and repairs a document's accessibility.

Acrobat Pro is licensed separately from Adobe Creative Cloud. You do not need a Creative Cloud subscription to use it, and you do not need to pay for it. CMC holds a site license covering faculty and staff, so if you are on the payroll the license is already yours — you just need to sign in.

If you only ever read and annotate PDFs, Adobe Reader is enough. If you produce documents that other people receive — syllabi, handbooks, forms, scanned readings, reports — Acrobat Pro is the tool that gets them into shape.

Licensing & Eligibility

• Faculty and staff only. The license is sized per FTE and does not extend to students. Students needing PDF work should use a computer lab machine or contact the Help Desk.
• No cost to you or your department. Acrobat Pro is covered by CMC's institutional site license. Nothing is charged back, and there is no annual renewal for you to budget or approve.
• No request needed. On a CMC-managed machine Acrobat Pro is already installed. Open it and sign in with CMC SSO — that is the whole process.
• Two devices per license. You can have Acrobat Pro activated on two machines at once — typically an office desktop and a laptop. To use a third, sign out of Acrobat on one of the first two; the seat frees up immediately.
• Sign in with CMC SSO. Acrobat activates against your CMC identity, not a personal Adobe ID. Never buy a personal Acrobat subscription for CMC work.
• Separate from Creative Cloud. Acrobat Pro eligibility says nothing about Photoshop, Illustrator, or the rest of the Creative Cloud suite, which is licensed on its own terms.

What You Can Do With It

Acrobat Pro does two different kinds of work, and the difference matters for what data you may put through it. Most of what you need happens on your own machine — the file never leaves your desk. A smaller set of features sends the document to Adobe's cloud to do their work. Sort your task into the right list before you start.

On-Device Features — up to P4 · Restricted

These run inside the installed application on your computer. Nothing is uploaded, and the document never reaches Adobe.

• Edit a PDF directly — change text, swap an image, fix a typo, or update a date without going back to the source file. Useful when the original Word document is long gone.
• Combine and reorganize — merge several files into one PDF, split a large document, and reorder, rotate, insert, or delete pages. Mixed inputs work: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and images can all go into the same combined PDF.
• Convert out of PDF — export to Word, Excel, or PowerPoint when you need to reuse content that only exists as a PDF. Tables come across as real spreadsheet rows rather than as a picture of a table.
• Scan and OCR — run optical character recognition over a scanned document so the text becomes searchable, selectable, and readable by assistive technology. A scan without OCR is an image, and neither search nor a screen reader can see a word of it. This is the reason a scanned P4 document can be processed at all: the recognition happens locally.
• Redact permanently — black out names, ID numbers, or other sensitive content so it is genuinely removed from the file, not merely hidden behind a rectangle. Drawing a black box in another tool leaves the text underneath fully recoverable. Redact locally, then check the classification of what is left before you share it.
• Sanitize and protect — strip hidden metadata, comments, and revision remnants before a document goes out, and set a password or restrict printing and copying where that is warranted.
• Compare two versions — put two drafts side by side and get a marked-up list of every textual and visual difference. Faster and more reliable than reading both.
• Build fillable forms — turn a static document into a form with text fields, checkboxes, and dropdowns that recipients complete on screen instead of printing, writing, and scanning back. Building the form is local; distributing it through Adobe is not (see below).
• Comment and review a local file — add and resolve markup in a document on your own machine or on a network share.
• Reduce file size — compress a document that is too large to email or too heavy to post to Canvas, without visibly degrading it.
• Accessibility checking and remediation — the whole toolset described below runs on-device.

Cloud Features — P2 · Internal only

These send your document to Adobe's servers. They are convenient, and for routine internal material they are fine — but the file leaves CMC's control, so keep confidential and restricted content out of them.

• The web tools at acrobat.adobe.com — browser-based converting, combining, and compressing. Every file you drop in is uploaded to Adobe. Handy when you are on a machine without Acrobat installed; not for anything sensitive.
• Adobe cloud storage — the "Recent" list and any document you save to Adobe's cloud rather than to your machine or to Box. CMC's managed storage is Box; prefer it.
• Share a link for review — the shared-review workflow that emails reviewers a link. The document is hosted by Adobe for the duration.
• Distribute a form and collect responses — the form and every response it gathers pass through Adobe.
• AI and generative features — any summarizing or chat-style assistant in Acrobat sends document content to Adobe for processing, and is additionally subject to CMC's AI governance process. See AI Solutions.

Accessibility & PDF Remediation

PDFs are the single most common accessibility problem in course and administrative material at CMC, and Acrobat Pro is the tool that fixes them. It is the reason most faculty and staff end up needing the license. All of it runs on-device, so a confidential or restricted document can be remediated without leaving your machine.

• Accessibility Checker (Full Check) — scans a document and reports what fails, so you are working from a list rather than guessing.
• Tags and reading order — add or repair the structure that tells a screen reader what is a heading, what is a list, and what order to read the page in.
• Alt text — describe images and figures, or mark them decorative so they are skipped.
• Table headers — designate header cells and set their scope so data cells announce with the right column and row.
• Document language — set it so screen readers pronounce the text correctly.
• OCR for scans — a scanned reading with no text layer is unusable with assistive technology; OCR is the first step in making it accessible.

Auto-tagging is a starting point, not a finished result — every auto-tagged document needs manual review. The Making PDFs Accessible guide walks through the full remediation workflow step by step. Creating the document accessibly in Word and exporting to PDF is always less work than remediating afterward.

Electronic Signatures

CMC's standard for electronic signatures is Box Sign, not Adobe. Route signature workflows through Box so that signed documents land in CMC's managed storage with the rest of the record. Acrobat Pro is for producing and preparing the document; Box Sign is for getting it signed.

Getting Started