Please recommend a drawing/sketching tool for PDFs 2

[RandomName]

In my last job with Jacobs I used BlueBeam Revu which was wonderful as a PDF editing software. Sketching was pretty effortless as I recall and there were lots of handy tools, even libraries for general structural shapes and various weld symbols. Everything worked smoothly: shapes, internal shading, dimensioning, etc.

I just switched jobs and now I'm being given Adobe 2017 as my only option which from what I can tell barely does anything. It's so bad it randomly breaks up a full page of text into separate chunks. WTF? How is this even sold to the public as a real program? This isn't in the same universe as what I had. And needless to say the drawing/commenting tools are incredibly basic. I can draw a few lines and change their color. That's about it.

Most people at my new company are older and hand-sketch things before scanning them in and attaching them to their engineering reports. Well, I'm at home so I don't have a scanner readily available and no, I'm not buying one. And TBH, that's not the answer. I need a simple, elegant PDF-editor in which I can make quality sketches without turning to a CAD sort of program.

Anyone have any ideas?

 

[TEDstruc]

BlueBeam is hands down the best I've used. I only used it for about 7 months, but all of the quick commands are great. You can almost draw in it like autocad. Typing "L" starts the line tool, "R" starts a rectangle, etc.... there is a snapshot tool that snapshots anything in your pdf and you can then paste it anywhere in that pdf or another: when you paste it, it doesn't bring in a white background, so you could past a sketch over content without blocking out the original content. You can also change the color of anything in the pdf, even if it was something you scanned in. Almost everything can be accessed by one click after you have the view settings dialed in. As mentioned by others, there are some built in tools like steel beam tool, weld callouts, etc... you can also create and customize your own tools. You can also edit text in bluebeam, even if it was scanned in (it has to be typed text, not hand written).

I have been using pdf exchange editor for about 7 months now, and it is definitely better than adobe, but not quite on par with bluebeam. I think other's have mentioned this, but the price of PDF Exchange Editor is very reasonable. I think a license is like $40(US). It does have the snapshot tool like bluebeam, except it will bring a white background when you paste it.