VERDICT With its incorporation of Flash-based media handling and new integration with Acrobat.com, the Acrobat platform fully embraces the internet age – at last.
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 to a whole host of workflows: documentation distribution, forms handling, secure exchange, searchable archiving, document review, commercial print and so on.

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 significant Acrobat release since the launch of the all-important free Reader application.
This new vitality is seen in important new functionality across all areas of PDF handling and across all Acrobat authoring applications (see Acrobat Alternatives boxout). However it is most obvious in the new top-of-the-range Adobe Acrobat 9 Extended release which provides full power across-the-board.
The major source of this new vitality is clear. Acrobat 9 merges the two previously separate arenas of PDF and Flash so enabling Acrobat to leave behind its static ePaper roots and move into today’s world of cutting-edge multimedia. In fact previous versions of Acrobat already supported the embedding of SWF content but playback depended on the user having separately installed the Flash player. Now, after its takeover of Macromedia, Adobe has been able to roll the Flash player into the 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 through the handling of video. The advantages of this for designers producing high-impact promotional work 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 can now reflect this reality, making it almost as easy to handle moving images as it is 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. Simply drag onscreen with the Video tool and a dialog appears in which you can import files in a wide range of formats including AVI, MOV, WMV and MPEG. Acrobat 9 Pro Extended will then automatically convert the file 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 role 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 productivity 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.
One major reason for converting to PDF is to keep searchable records and Acrobat 9 sees a number of improvements when it comes to archiving starting with 256-bit AES encryption. For storing web pages, Acrobat’s Web Capture capability is enhanced by its 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 DOC format, Acrobat 9 can now double up as a dedicated OCR app. When it comes to data retrieval, Acrobat 9 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 effectively just 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”. Effectively these provide an attractive, interactive front-end to your component files.
Creating your portfolio is simple. First you drag and drop your files onto the main Edit Portfolio window. Then, using the tabbed task pane panel, you choose a layout (the presets provided are Basic Grid, On Image, Revolve and Sliding Row), add a welcome page and header, select a colour scheme and specify the file details as they will appear onscreen. It’s all very straightforward and the results certainly look far more polished and professional – and advanced designers can go further by using Flash/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 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 horrendously inefficient round-robin email approach. Now Adobe has come up with an extraordinarily ambitious solution – it’s providing all its users with free hosting on the completely revamped Acrobat.com site. Simply select the Share Documents on Acrobat.com command and you can post your PDF to the site and automatically send out emails with an invitation to view and download the URL (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 reviews, this process is largely automatic as 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, quickly email all those participants that haven’t responded and so on.
That’s by no means all when it comes to new forms and collaboration functionality. For producing advanced XML-based forms, Adobe provides the 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 also 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 – automatically highlighting 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 synchronize your current page views and exchange chat messages live. 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 (this LiveConnect capability isn’t actually tied to Acrobat - just 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? To begin with, it replaces the former Acrobat 3D release that was targeted at CAD specialists 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. New power includes 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. Setting up or “georegistering” your map involves setting boundary co-ordinates and the projection scale. Once done, users of the free Reader can interact with the map by viewing the latitude and longitude of geographic locations, measuring distance, area and perimeter and exporting locations and measurements – and have such live access offline when on the go and out in the field.

Adobe Presenter

The real stand out, and major selling point, for Acrobat 9 Pro Extended is the inclusion of Adobe Presenter 7 (standalone price £309 ex VAT). This is an add-on for Microsoft PowerPoint which dramatically increases its host’s authoring 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 you have another near-universal publishing option: PDF. And with the Flash player now integrated into Adobe Reader, the resulting PDF is just as rich and engaging as the SWF. In other words Acrobat 9 now enhances Flash with its standalone nature and offline playback just as Flash enhances PDF with its media handling and interactivity. Adobe Presenter’s ability to combine the strengths of Acrobat, Flash and PowerPoint shows the full flexibility of the new Acrobat 9 platform at its best.
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 (see boxout). 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.
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.

EASE OF USE 4/6
FEATURES 6/6
VALUE FOR MONEY 5/6
OVERALL 5/6

Acrobat Alternatives: Reader / Standard / Pro

Naturally Adobe would like you to buy into its top-of-the-range Acrobat 9 Pro Extended application – but that only makes sense if you’re going to be using its advanced features. If your PDF based requirements are less demanding then you can save yourself a lot of money.
In fact you might not need to spend anything. To benefit as an end user from Acrobat 9’s new media support for maps and Flash-based advances such as interactive portfolios and video playback, all you need is the free Adobe Reader application (www.adobe.com/go/reader). And these days the Reader is no longer limited to viewing and printing: if the original author enables the functionality, you can use the Reader to digitally sign, review and fill-in PDFs – and now even collaborate live on them.
The obvious limitation of Reader is that it doesn’t let you produce your own PDFs - though if you sign up to Acrobat.com you can now create five a month online for free.
Other unlimited low-cost PDF authoring options include pdfFactoryPro and PDF Converter. Adobe’s own entry-level option, Acrobat 9 Standard is far more expensive (£265 ex VAT, upgrade £85 ex VAT) but scores over these third-party options in its tighter and wider integration with all the Microsoft productivity apps, its OCR and Web Capture capabilities and, in particular in this latest release, its enhanced document review and form handling functionality including the new integration with Acrobat.com and the ability to enable Reader users to complete and save forms.
Acrobat 9 Pro (£425 ex VAT, upgrade £145 ex VAT) takes Standard as its basis and adds functionality all round. You can create PDFs from AutoCAD and Visio and combine files into a polished and fully customisable PDF portfolios. Form handling is enhanced by the inclusion of the standalone XML-based Designer app, while digital signing, document review and live collaboration can be extended to Reader users. And for use in commercial print workflows, Pro adds important preflight capabilities along with onscreen preview of colour separations.
The sheer range of functionality that Acrobat offers can be overwhelming and it can be difficult to know just what features each version of Acrobat provides. However the basic rule of thumb is that Reader is aimed at the consumer, Standard at the office-based user, Pro at the designer and Pro Extended at those high-end users who need maximum power.