PDF Toolkit + does a good job in concatenating and segmenting PDF files. I think it was free.
Another one is BookletCreator is putting books together.
I think everyone agrees that marking up PDFs is clumsy by comparison. If itās needed because proofing has been left till too late in the production cycle, thatās a pain. But for checking layouts it canāt really be avoided. The job that prompted my original rant was an English-language report for a German company. Even if the original text is perfect, things like quotation marks and decimal points always end up āGermanā when the layout people re-type them into pull-quotes, or someone adjusts a heading to make it fit. Markup like that was quicker in the days of paper!
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I have found it depends on who is going to read the markup. For example, I use Skim & PDF Expert (for different purposes), but comments in Acrobat only show the first line in the others - leading to me making some bad errors as Iād not seem the whole conversation. So Iāve found Acrobat my main tool when working with others and skim when just for me.
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By the way, I want also to recommend PDF Squeezer, which does a great job of reducing the size of PDFs. Itās quick, simple, and cheap. I always used to have trouble with massively oversized PDFs that were hard to email or upload to our LMS, and this really helped that situation.
Just a satisfied customer.
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I was all ready to jump in with an answer ā PDF EXPERT, of course! Iāve been using it for years to serve nearly all my note-taking and editing needs, and if I had to proof-read PDFs, Iād load PDF Expert in a heartbeat ālong before wasting my time with that kludgy, infuriatingly error-prone Acrobat Copycat called PDF Nitro.
I strongly believe you can do all the tasks you enumerate with PDF Expert, but if I had the workload you imply having, I wouldnāt bother.
Instead, Iād go the route @silbey recommends, viz., importing your PDF into the latest release of Wordāthen proofing it, duplicating the proofed Word .docx, then converting one copy to PDF, and returning both the corrected .docx file and the corrected PDF to your client.
As you say, no other editor does the fine-grained job of editing āand tracking edits!ā that is the specialty of Word, and no other word processor is as compatible with iOS, MacOS and Windows. So, why fight it? Word both edits AND tracks your edits with far less effort than Acrobat Pro.
AND, when it comes to splicing or dividing PDFs, no other software works as well as Preview for MacOS. Again, why fight it?
All this said, if you want a demonstration of how to proof documents with PDF Editor, Iām pretty sure it can be done. Just give me a sample page, tell me what you want doneāand Iāll get out my oil can and endeavor to comply. If it turns out youāre right and Iām wrong, no hard feelings. Youāre right, Iām wrong, and Iāve learned something. But why waste time? Simply do as @silbey recommends.
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Arthur Johnson is deeply wise.
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So is @silbey 
! I must natter on for another sentence in order to be approved for this thread, so here we are.
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LOVE PDF Squeezer! I like simple, dedicated apps/utilities like this that donāt try to be a āJack of all trades.ā
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