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.

VERDICT A wide range of PDF handling power at a fraction of the cost of Adobe Acrobat.
With its ability to create a fixed electronic representation of the printed page, Adobe’s PDF (Portable Document Format) is one of the most important file formats around acting as the standard medium for a whole host of tasks – document exchange, collaboration and review, print production, form handling, archiving and so on. Adobe would naturally like you to use its own Acrobat applications to take full advantage of the format, but there is an alternative: Nuance’s PDF Converter Professional.

VERDICT A wide range of PDF handling power at a fraction of the cost of Adobe Acrobat.
With its ability to create a fixed electronic representation of the printed page, Adobe’s PDF (Portable Document Format) is one of the most important file formats around acting as the standard medium for a whole host of tasks – document exchange, collaboration and review, print production, form handling, archiving and so on. Adobe would naturally like you to use its own Acrobat applications to take full advantage of the format, but there is an alternative: Nuance’s PDF Converter Professional.

VERDICT: A questionable interface redesign, greater-than-ever complexity and a general half-baked feeling.

Acrobat’s great strength is its multi-purpose flexibility but this leads to its great weakness – complexity. With Acrobat 8 Professional, Adobe finally attempts to tackle the problem...

VERDICT: New multiple page support and improved text handling and workflow integration but the program’s main strength remains its underlying speed.

Xara has always stood out for the astonishing speed of its vector handling and for the hands-on creativity that this enables...

Tom Arah looks at the history, problems, solutions and future of designing for the screen.

Previously I looked at the history of desktop publishing (DTP) with its focus on print-based design and output to paper. However the advent of the Apple Mac and of the Graphical User Interface (GUI) into the mainstream of personal computing also heralded the opening up of an entirely new publishing medium and one that is set to become even more important than paper – the computer screen itself.