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 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...