adobe acrobat 4.0 - Software Review - Evaluation

Emedia Professional, Sept, 1999 by Robert J. Boeri

Since its market introduction in the early '90s, Adobe Acrobat has become the digital paper standard for documents stored and delivered on optical or magnetic media and the Web, and has become the front-runner in four major electronic document applications: distributing electronic documents via the Web or CD-ROM, as well as desktop and commercial printing. Now you can add to that list budding support for workflow, easier creation of enriched Portable Document Format (PDF) structures, and enhanced support for the Web.

What do you find when you first run Acrobat 4.0? For openers, you see a slick new interface, evolved from version 3.0, bigger yet efficiently delivering all that Acrobat has to offer. In version 4.0, Adobe has added value primarily by building on its successful past, bundling technologies and tools from Adobe development partners who sold these tools separately. Adobe has also laid the architectural groundwork for future expansion and integration with other Adobe products through a consistent plug-in architecture and an upgrade to Acrobat's core architecture. The result after more than a two-year wait is a product significantly upgraded from its predecessor, well worth buying or upgrading (although initially all features are available only on Windows platforms). The Mac version is not as functionally rich, and the UNIX version is planned, but not deliverable as of this writing. Currently, Acrobat Reader is available for the two major platforms, but Reader's search plug-in--the formerly free companion product for distributing your indexed collections to others--was also in development as of early May. Acrobat 4.0 is also not as compatible with its 3.0x predecessor as you might expect. With those caveats, I am still an Acrobat fan and 4.0 is still one of those tools you must have if you're involved with any type of digital publishing or document information management.

the fruits of Adobe's labor

Many of the product's major new features are built on the new 1.3 architecture. (Acrobat 3.0 was released in November 1996 with a 1.2 architecture.) Central to this version is its increased ease of use, featuring a tool bar for easy access to both new and familiar Acrobat features, floating palettes with bookmarks and other structures for enhanced display and navigation, conversion to PDF of popular document formats, predefined job options in Distiller, and flexible external object attachment. The upgrade also incorporates new third-party plug-ins and technologies, plus annotation tools, digital signatures, Web capturing, email integration, and batch processing; enhanced prepress and service bureau capabilities, including color profiles and support for PostScript 3.0; and expanded forms capabilities.

For a street price of about $249, you'll get the following collection of products and applications:

* The functionality of what was formerly known as Exchange plus PDFwriter--the quick print driver that produces PDF files. This is the core product from which most of the plug-ins are available, including the full-text search plug-in companion to Catalog.

* Acrobat Catalog, the application producing full-text indices of PDF document collections. Upgraded to 32-bit for faster indexing speeds, Catalog is functionally the same as in version 3.0.

* Acrobat Distiller, which converts one or more PostScript files to PDF. Conceptually the same utility as in 3.0, Distiller gives users visually faithful renditions of the printed originals, with controls over font embedding and compression schemes for graphics. In 4.0, Distiller supports PostScript 3.0 and comes with presets for optimized delivery to screens, printers, and service bureaus. It also features a fully integrated helper application (Distiller Assistant).

* Adobe Postscript Printer Driver (AdobePS 4.2) for Windows 95, which provides features not found in the standard Postscript driver (like watermark printing and support for image color matching).

* Acrobat Reader (the freely distributed PDF viewer), minus the full-text search plug-in (as of this writing).

* QuickTime 3.0.2 Movie Player and browser plug-in.

* A PDF version of the user manual and assorted tutorials, including a seven-minute AVI movie.

Version 1.3 of the Acrobat architecture provides a base for hierarchical structures such as XML, enhanced embedding of non-DF files in an Acrobat PDF file, and new capabilities such as digital signatures. Adobe is building a common set of APIs and DLLs for sharing across Adobe applications, and in time, will result in better support and smaller installations.

searching the Web the inexpensive way ... offline

If you are a serious Web researcher, you'll love the new Web Capture feature. Similar to Verity's CD-Web Publisher, Acrobat's Web Capture lets you produce a comprehensive PDF rendition of some or all of a Web site, with active links. Acrobat can download HTML pages, JPEG and GIF graphics (including the first frame of an animated GIF), text files, image maps, and password-secured areas from a site. (Note: Web capture is not available on the Mac version of Acrobat at this time, but is planned.) After you've captured some of a Web site, you can always re-invoke Web Capture and cherry-pick items of interest and add them to the PDF file. Full-text index the result with Catalog and you'll easily create rich information Web collections for offline searching and reference.