adobe acrobat 4.0 - Software Review - Evaluation

Emedia Professional, Sept, 1999 by Robert J. Boeri

perking up your PDFs

Besides Distiller enhancements, you can now simply drag-and-drop many popular file formats such as JPEG graphics to Acrobat for conversion to PDF. Particularly impressive here is PDFMaker for Microsoft Word 97, PowerPoint 97, and Excel 97. Although a similar add-on has been available from Adobe previously, PDFMaker is now packaged as part of the standard Acrobat release. This powerful tool eliminates the need to handcraft links and bookmarks (including links to URLs) and builds them automatically from supported native document structures. Recycling PDF files is also improved in version 4.0, since Acrobat now extends copying beyond rich text and graphics to include tables from Acrobat to RTF-aware applications.

Do you want to assure that PDF documents are annotated, reviewed, and explicitly approved throughout a work process? Supplementing version 3.0's notes tool is an array of highlighting and other visual annotation devices, including stamps like "draft." Voice-annotation is now a built-in capability too, thanks to the 1.3 architecture's ability to embed nearly arbitrary objects (such as attached spreadsheets).

If you'd like to see what's changed between two versions of a document, use Adobe's new "Compare Pages" command, which highlights the changes between two documents, page by page. If you want to assure that changes to PDF renditions of documents have been approved, use Acrobat's Digital signatures, which allow users to indicate whether approval has been granted. Users can even see the sequence of approvals, check the authenticity of signatures, and view earlier signed versions of documents.

Forms are often an integral part of work processes, and Acrobat has enhanced its forms support too. In 4.0, JavaScript processing enables users to increase a form's intelligence, perhaps by adding date-range checking. Acrobat comes with an electronic specification titled "Acrobat Forms JavaScript Object Specification" as a starting point. If the publishing workflow includes service bureaus, Acrobat's enhanced color support (including the International Color Consortium's color profiles) extends that workflow through service bureaus. With Acrobat's new prepress dialog box, users can bypass color management systems to preserve original CMYK and gray values if the PDF file is to be used to make color plates for printing. Acrobat also has a batch processing facility, so you can apply various security, optimization, and other features to entire folders of PDF files.

searching for the search plug-in

One of Acrobat's most popular features is its ability to index collections of PDF files for full-text searching using Verity's search plug-in. This remains one of Acrobat's most compelling applications, and Adobe has enhanced it even further by making Catalog a 32-bit application for faster indices production and bug fixes. However, the search subsystem (including Index Management) has not been functionally enhanced in years. Therefore, you must still maintain each indexed collection of files on the same medium (an index can't scan files on a CD-ROM and ZIP or LAN content, for example).