Acrobat 5.0
Ease of use, portability, eliability, and many other improvements
make version 5.0 a smart upgrade decision.
Reviewed by:
Blake Boyer
Adobe Acrobat and its PDF format has become the standard in electronic
document delivery. If you're only familiar with Acrobat from receiving
PDF files and using Acrobat Reader, then you need to familiarize
yourself with this full-featured program. Adobe PDF is a universal
file format that preserves all of the fonts, formatting, colors
and graphics of any source document, regardless of the application
and platform used to create it. Adobe PDF files are compact and
can be shared, viewed, navigated and printed exactly as intended
by anyone with free Acrobat Reader software. More than 200 million
copies of the free Acrobat Reader have been distributed worldwide.
You can convert any document to Adobe PDF using Adobe Acrobat
5.0 software.
Acrobat 5.0 is the core application that allows you to create
feature rich documents from exported work from almost all major
software application. Acrobat can contain images, smart links,
bookmarks, form data, comments, handwritten scribbles, sound and
movie clips, secure digital signatures, and more. The PDFs created
by Acrobat can be annotated by multiple users, easily transferred
by e-mail, and distributed via the Web.
Adobe has broadens and deepens the software's functionality,
adding new security features, export filters, document-repurposing
options, workgroup-collaboration features, and other enhancements.
In short, if you use Acrobat, consider this a must-have upgrade.
And if you don't use Acrobat yet, this may the time to take it
for a spin.
Web Tool Emphasis
This newest version of Acrobat continues to further emphasize
Web tools and workgroup collaboration. Acrobat has also been optimized
for network implementation. Network administrators can now setup
Acrobat over a network and customize the Acrobat installer to
assign and limit features appropriately for different users.
If you tend to think of Acrobat as a mechanism for electronic
publishing, you'll appreciate Acrobat's ability to tag PDFs. Structured
documents must be created in a special program such as Adobe FrameMaker,
but tagged PDF files are created automatically when a Web page
is saved to PDF or when you use the included PDF Maker application
within Office 2000. Tagging lets you create documents that can
be reflowed easily to accommodate different media or devices.
You might, for example, want a slightly different viewing order
for files served as an e-book or Web page. In a tagged file, all
style elements are defined as tags and will appear as a hierarchical
list within the Tags palette.
Acrobat 5.0's tagged files let you change the flow of a document
to accommodate different output intents such as paper versus an
e-book. The Tags palette shows all style elements in a hierarchal
list.
Flexibility
A new feature that will get your attention is the ability to
quickly develop new documents from an Adobe PDF file. Simply save
the PDF file to the Rich Text Format (RTF - or any one of five
other output formats, so that you can reuse text in a new document.
You could extract text from a PDF file before, but it was a tedious
manual process. The results seem to vary depending upon the structure
of the PDF format, with multiple columns being a nightmare.When
generating RTF files, Acrobat did not preserve embedded images
or multiple-column layouts. Time have changed.
Acrobat 5.0 also boasts flexibility with its ability to save
PDFs in various non-native formats. In contrast to previous versions,
Acrobat 5.0 lets you save files to any of numerous formats, including
RTF, EPS, and PS. You can also save PDF files as images, using
TIFF, JPEG, or PNG format. When saving to image formats, each
page is output as a separate file, but there is ample provision
for adjusting output settings such as resolution, compression,
and color space; Acrobat 5.0 uses the same Adobe Color Engine
as Illustrator 9.0 and Photoshop 6.0. In addition, you can extract
images contained in any PDF file to JPG, PNG, or TIF, which is
useful for recapturing artwork in editable form.
Feel Secure
Acrobat 5.0 lets you create a digital signature with either Acrobat's
own Self-Sign Security system or use third-party commercial certificates.
Such signatures may be placed into a signature form field, to
digitally sign a document and ensure your changes are preserved.
Version 5.0 lets you review all the signatures within a document,
retrieve any version, and compare any two signed versions, and
verify digital signatures via a user certificate that the signer
gives you. And to make exchanging public keys easier, Adobe built
in the ability to exchange keys via e-mail from within the program.
Collaboration
Adobe has made it easy for workgroups to share PDFs over the
Internet using WebDAV (Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning)
support. Your workgroup will simply need a shared data repository
such as a network folder or ODBC database. And you can annotate
and sign PDFs from within your browser: The Acrobat toolbars and
navigation pane appear in your browser, below your browser's toolbars.
Acrobat 5.0 has also beefed up its security to help you protect
your PDF files and content from unauthorized use. PKI certificates
and 128-bit encryption are fully supported (the 4.0 version had
40-bit encryption).
And More
Other enhancements include tighter Web integration, support for
industry standard protocols like Open DataBase Connectivity (ODBC)
that connect PDF forms with back-end databases, and easier data
exchange in Adobe PDF files through support for the eXtensible
Markup Language (XML). Forms submitted in the Web-standard XML
(Extensible Markup Language) are easier to integrate with back-end
systems. This means that people can fill out PDF forms on Websites
and return them digitally.
System Requirements Windows system requirements for Acrobat
5.0 are:
Pentium processor, Windows 95 OSR 2.0, 98, Me, NT 4.0 or Windows
2000;
32MB of RAM (64MB recommended);
115MB of available hard-disk space and a CD-ROM drive.
Full product retail price is $249, upgrades are $99.
