Adobe announces Acrobat 8
Adobe has announced the next version of its portable document application, Acrobat. Acrobat, the most commonly used platform-independent format for exchanging documents, is going to come under pressure after the launch of Windows Vista, when Microsoft introduces its own rival file format to Adobe Acrobat's PDF.
13 November 2006
The new version of Acrobat has had quite an overhaul, showing that Adobe isn’t resting on its laurels. Whether the changes are enough to tempt people to upgrade remains to be seen.
For the most part, the changes represent ways of Acrobat improving what it already does, rather than introducing new features. The most obvious is a new task-based interface, which makes it easier for new users to get started and more logical for experienced users. The standard menu is supplemented by a new toolbar, which replaces the toolbars in Acrobat 7 – and shows options for creating, combining and exporting PDFs, along with security, forms and reviewing options. It instantly makes more sense and helps to unclutter what can be a complex application for some to use.
Application support is improved – it’s now easier to create PDFs from within all Microsoft Office applications, although as with the previous version, PDFs can be created from any application which can print. For more specialised document formats such as AutoCad, there is even better news – Acrobat preserves the layers and document sizes of the original document, making it a much more valid tool for circulating designs.
One of the great advances in Acrobat 8 is the slickness with which documents can be combined. In previous versions this would be tedious, requiring PDFs to be created from each application, before opening them in Acrobat and bringing them together, one file at a time. With Acrobat 8, you simply browse to the files which you want to combine and highlight them. If you choose, you can select which pages (or slides if it’s a PowerPoint presentation) you wish to bring in from each file. These can then be brought together into a single file, where you can add your own headers, footers and watermarks if you wish – or keep them ‘together but separate’ in a PDF package. It’s fast, neat and works really well.
A nice touch is that multimedia files can now be included into Acrobat documents, such as 3D movies and demos, extending its usefulness still further. There is also now greater control over file compression, allowing Acrobat files to be optimised for size or quality – much better than the current ‘reduce file size’ command.
Document review and commenting has always been one of Acrobat’s strong points – making it a firm favourite for design companies especially, but also for any review process where not everyone has a copy of the originating application.
Here, Adobe has made some significant changes. All of the familiar commenting tools (such as post-it notes, highlighting and so on) are available, but it’s now possible to comment, and review the history of comments, in much the same way as you would in a forum or discussion group. You’d think that it would be hard to improve on that, but Acrobat has a couple of new tricks up its sleeve. It’s now easier to enable commenting in the free Acrobat reader (this is possible with version 7 but it’s both hard to discover and long-winded to use) meaning that those people who need to review Acrobat documents no longer need to pay for the higher-level version of Acrobat in order to do so. Finally, though, it’s now possible to create a live forum – an on-line presentation/discussion, where documents are reviewed in real time, though this does have to be paid for as an additional item, with a monthly subscription. Despite the additional cost, it’s nonetheless impressive.
Other improvements can be found in the collection of information too – enabling easier creation of electronic forms which can be filled in by anyone with the free Adobe Acrobat reader, and digitally signed by anyone with the full products. Forms can be based on documents or scanned pages, or you can use Adobe’s built in tools to create a new form.
Security is impressively beefed up, giving more (and easier) control over whether documents are password-protected, can be printed, copied from or edited. Documents can also be encrypted for extra security, and there are redaction tools which allow you to securely hide sensitive information from documents before circulating them. You can also remove hidden meta data (such as the author’s name, date and bookmarks) from files with a few clicks.
While these may be improvements to current features, this is no lame upgrade, but a set of must-have features which have raised the bar on what is already a very powerful product. If your organisation uses Acrobat on a regular basis, this is going to be an important upgrade.
