Product Reviews

Adobe Acrobat made its public debut back in 1991 and the PDF (Portable Document Format) it introduced was intended to become the universal format for design-rich, cross-platform electronic communication.

The launch of the World Wide Web in the same year forced Adobe to radically revise its plans, but the Acrobat platform survived and eventually prospered by making itself indispensable in a whole host of workflows situations, from documentation distribution to commercial printing.

Recently however Acrobat has been showing its age and come to feel slow, lumbering and old-fashioned: a dinosaur in today's fast-pace internet age. With the chronically unimpressive version 8 release it even seemed that Acrobat might be reaching the end of its useful life. The good news is that that's not the case at all. In fact version 9 is the most exciting Acrobat release since the launch of the all-important free Reader application.

Back from the dead

This new vitality is evident in the introduction of important new features across all areas of PDF handling and across the entire range of Acrobat authoring tools. It is most obvious, however, in the new, top-of-the-range Adobe Acrobat 9 Extended package.

The source of this new lease of life is clear. It springs from the merging of the previously separate technologies PDF and Flash, and allows Acrobat to leave its static ePaper roots behind. Previous versions of Acrobat already supported the embedding of SWF content, but playback depended on the user having separately installed the Flash player. After its takeover of Macromedia, Adobe has been able to roll the Flash player into Adobe Reader. Universal, reliable and web-efficient media delivery is now integral to the Acrobat platform.

The benefits of this Flash transfusion are most directly felt in the handling of video. The advantages of this for designers are clear, but these days video isn't limited to such high end use. With the ever-increasing spread of webcams and movie-capable cameras and camera phones, video is now an everyday part of computing life. Thanks to Flash, Acrobat now reflects this, making it almost as easy to handle moving images as static pictures.

However there's a problem: Flash only supports its own web-optimised Flash Video (FLV) format. No doubt support for FLV output will spread but in the meantime you'll need a converter. And that's exactly what Acrobat 9 Pro Extended provides. The Video tool lets you import files in a wide range of formats including AVI, MOV, WMV and MPEG, which Acrobat 9 Pro Extended will then automatically convert to FLV, pull out your selected frame as a poster image and wrap everything up in a Flash-based player.

Acrobat's Video tool lets you add impact to existing PDFs but to take full advantage of the new support you'll need a dedicated design environment. No doubt this will come with the next release of Adobe's Creative Suite and the benefits of PDF-based Flash support for the likes of InDesign, Premiere Pro and Encore are enticing.

For now though, and for more general use, Adobe enables the main Microsoft apps to fill the gap by providing new Embed Video and Convert to Flash Format commands. This is an excellent example of Acrobat's ability to work closely with, and make the most of, end users' most popular applications. Acrobat 9 sees updated versions of all its macro-based PDF authoring capabilities across the full range of Microsoft's office applications - Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Outlook and Internet Explorer. It also provides dedicated PDF authoring for Lotus Notes and, via the latest versions of the Acrobat Print Driver and standalone Acrobat Distiller, for any application that can print.

Archiving improved

One major reason for using PDF is to keep searchable records and Acrobat 9 sees a number of improvements on this front. The first is support for 256-bit AES encryption, but the web page conversion tool - Web Capture - is also now much better thanks to native Flash support, and the ability to only convert selected areas of the page.

Even bigger strides have been made when it comes to converting hard copy to electronic archive with improved OCR technology and wider support for scanners. Combined with the improved output to Word's DOC format, Acrobat 9 can now double up as a dedicated OCR app. When it comes to data retrieval, Acrobat 9 also adds easy searching across all PDFs within a folder.

Rather than dealing with single PDFs, you'll often want to combine PDFs from multiple sources and even include other file formats. Previously this was left to PDF Packages which simply bundled all files together - not exactly professional. A major advance in Acrobat 9 - and an excellent demonstration of the new Flash integration - is the conversion of packages into "portfolios". These provide an attractive, interactive front-end to your component files.

Creating portfolios is a simple matter of dragging and dropping files onto the main Edit Portfolio window, then choosing a layout from a list of presets provided, adding a welcome page and header, selecting a colour scheme and specifying the file details as they will appear onscreen. It's all very straightforward and the results certainly look very polished. Designers can go further by using Flash and Flex to create their own custom layouts.

Flash-based PDF Portfolios help make the whole Acrobat experience more interactive and more modern, but in fact users have been interacting with their PDFs almost since they were invented - filling forms, signing documents and commenting on projects. Originally such interaction was restricted to users of the paid-for Acrobat apps, but recently there's

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been a significant shift with users of the high-end Acrobat applications able to unlock this functionality for users of the free Reader program.

Acrobat.com

Acrobat 9 sees another similarly important paradigm shift for PDF-based interaction. For a while now Acrobat has supported centralized server-based hosting of PDFs but the set-up involved meant that few took it up, instead sticking with the awkward and inefficient round-robin email approach. Now, Adobe has come up with an extraordinarily ambitious fix for the problem - it's providing all of its users with free hosting on the completely revamped Acrobat.com site.

Select the "Share Documents on Acrobat.com" command and you can post your PDF to the site and it will automatically send out emails with an invitation to view and download (in the process avoiding potential problems with email security and file size settings).

Of course that's not the end of the matter - you also need to collate and track the comments and forms data as they are returned. For shared review, this process is largely automatic: when reviewers publish their comments to Acrobat.com these are now automatically reflected in the hosted PDF and made visible to all.

For forms, the published data can simply be sent to your Inbox for manual collation or now routed via Acrobat.com for automatic handling. When data is received, a notification appears in your system tray and clicking on this opens Acrobat 9's revamped Tracker where you can see a consolidated view of returns, and quickly email all those participants that haven't responded.

Further advances

That's by no means all when it comes to new forms and collaboration features. For producing advanced XML-based forms, there's the new standalone LiveCycle Designer ES (not for the faint-hearted). For occasional use the reworked Start Form wizard is likely to do all that you need - automatically spotting potential form fields in any PDF, including those created from scanned hard copy and now letting you check that they are setup correctly. When you've collected your responses in the Tracker you can now search, sort and filter data much as you would in a spreadsheet before exporting for advanced analysis.

In terms of document collaboration and review, the new Document Compare command should prove very useful. This automatically highlights differences between two versions of a PowerPoint presentation, for example, right down to recoloured images.

Acrobat 9 even enables real time review. Use the Send and Collaborate Live command and you can email others a PDF or Acrobat.com link that, when opened, opens up a new Collaborate Live task pane. Using this, you can synchronise your current page views and exchange chat messages. Using the Share My Screen command you can move beyond page sharing to share and discuss any currently open application with up to three users in a new browser window, though this capability isn't actually tied to Acrobat - you can simply sign up at Acrobat.com.

Apart from the FLV video conversion all the features described above are available not just in Acrobat 9 Pro Extended, but in Acrobat 9 Pro. So what else does Extended offer to justify its hefty price tag?

Well, first it takes in features formerly covered in the separately released Acrobat 3D (now discontinued), which means that you can insert a whole range of 3D models in formats such as 3DS, OBJ and DAE. These can then be rotated in 3D space, relit and re-rendered and all from within the free Reader application. There are also new features on this front, including a dedicated 3D Reviewer and the ability to export models to 2D vector formats.

Acrobat 9 Pro Extended also adds support for an entirely new media type: maps. Once you've set up or "georegistered" a map involves (with boundary co-ordinates and the map scale), users of Reader can interact with it by viewing the latitude and longitude coordinates, measuring distance, area and perimeter and exporting locations and measurements.

Adobe Presenter

The real stand out, and major selling point, for Acrobat 9 Pro Extended, however, is the inclusion of Adobe Presenter 7, which costs £309 exc VAT on its own. This is an add-on for Microsoft PowerPoint that dramatically increases its power. To begin with it adds advanced media handling which lets you insert flash SWF animations, record, synch and edit an audio commentary for your slides, and insert, capture and edit video. You can also create interactive quizzes based on a range of question types: multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank and so on.

The real strength of Presenter has always come from the fact that you can then export your media-enhanced, interactive PowerPoint presentation to Flash SWF ready for high-impact, web-efficient playback in any browser. Now, there's another near-universal publishing option available: PDF. And with the Flash player now integrated into Adobe Reader, the resulting PDF is just as rich and engaging as SWF.

Conclusion

Acrobat 9 Pro Extended is certainly not cheap and if you aren't going to use its advanced capabilities - and it's difficult to imagine how you could use all of them - you could save a great deal of money by looking at the alternatives.

On the other hand when you consider everything that the PDF format is now capable of - and remembering that Extended is considerably cheaper than the Acrobat 3D release that it replaces and throws in Adobe Presenter for good luck - you have to say that it's good value.

It certainly is in the US where the RRP is US$699. Here UK rip-off pricing applies, depriving Acrobat Pro Extended of an otherwise well-deserved Recommended award.

It's a real pity as Acrobat 9 gives the PDF platform a new lease of life and Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro Extended lets you make the absolute most of its wide-ranging power.