Adobe Systems Inc.’s mantra of “create once, view anywhere” is seldom encapsulated in such a fine-grained fashion as in the PDF format.

Adobe Acrobat Professional 6.0 is easily split into three different panes for document viewing. On the left, user-selected summaries. In the center, the actual document. On the right, search and help screens.
Graphic: Adobe Systems

Designed to be truly cross-platform, the format has succeeded in becoming a near defacto standard for the interchange of documents in publishing, the office environment and increasingly, on the Internet.

In previous versions, Adobe Acrobat consisted of two parts: a free reader application and the Acrobat creator/distiller.

With the release of Acrobat 6.0, Adobe has split the software into three possible versions, each with varying capabilities aimed at matching user needs.

Of the new offshoots, Adobe Acrobat 6.0 Standard is the one that most closely mirrors the functionality of the current version.

Acrobat 6.0 Professional adds advanced features such as built-in validation and preflighting tools based on technology from Callas Software GmbH.

Professional also can output PDF/X-compliant files, preview and print color separations and create large-format PDFs from applications such as AutoCAD, Microsoft Visio and Microsoft Project for Windows.

Adobe Acrobat Elements, meanwhile, is a stripped-down and lightweight version engineered for one task: to create PDFs from applications such as Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer.

It’s not sold as a stand-alone boxed product. Instead, it’s designed to be licensed in large quantities to companies that want to use PDF as a standard format corporate-wide.

With all the versions, Adobe Reader is included at no charge.

Install fast

We took Acrobat Professional for a test drive. We were provided with a final beta version of the software due to our publishing deadlines, but Adobe assured us that the version had almost all of the functionality of the final shipping product.

The install was fast on our PC. We already had version 5.0 and Acrobat asked whether we wanted to keep the earlier version or overwrite it, warning that the applications might conflict if we chose to keep both.

Since we were installing a final beta, we elected to keep 5.0 and encountered no problems despite the warning.

Acrobat 6.0’s user interface is quite a leap over 5.0’s. Menus are much more logically designed and there are more of them. The final effect is menus with shorter lengths but with more choices arrayed across the top of the screen.

More aggressive

Adobe has been getting more aggressive in its bid to create more futuristic-looking interfaces and 6.0 is one of its best-looking efforts yet. It clearly has the XP/OS X type of look with pastel colors, transparent menus and great-looking typefaces.

One feature we noticed immediately was how Adobe Acrobat automatically integrated with other selected applications. After rebooting our computer following the install, Microsoft Word opened with a new toolbar boasting Acrobat’s familiar symbols and icons.

Creating a PDF was as easy as clicking one of these icons and deciding where to save it.

All together now

Enhanced collaboration tools have also been added to Standard and Professional.

It’s easy to create color-coded notes that are quite a bit like floating “sticky notes.” They can be created to appear in their entirety or pop up when moused over or deliberately selected.

With these notes, viewers can comment on another person’s remarks and add their own as well; Adobe calls this the “review process.” In addition to notes, a reviewer can also make actual changes to the document by inserting or deleting text or images.

We were thwarted in our efforts to test another one of Acrobat’s text-editing features because it requires the use of Word 2002, which we don’t yet have.

With this feature, once all reviewers have made their changes to a Word-based PDF, the author can choose which changes to accept or reject in the final version. Word will then make any changes automatically.

E-mail integration

All these features integrate with e-mail as well. On our system for example, Acrobat easily meshed with our Outlook application. It’s a one-button operation to create a PDF from a Word document and have Acrobat e-mail a person or persons on an address list, requesting them to review the document and make changes as necessary.

The professional user that likes to get under the hood will find the sheer number of output options amazing.

Virtually every single aspect of PDF creation is available to be modified and tweaked. For example, there are nearly 20 choices on commenting alone, covering everything from the comment’s opacity to how the pop-up behaves.

Default works well

Acrobat defaults with options appropriate for the vast majority of users, but the software is engineered with plenty of additional choices to alter its behavior and settings.
6.0 Professional seems ideally suited to users equipped with monitors boasting larger screens and higher resolutions.

The screen can be divided into panes, with the left-hand panel containing a graphical representation of all the document’s pages, the center displaying the actual document and the rightmost screen showing a help menu.

This split presentation allowed us to navigate easily through larger documents. When scrolling through the document in the center pane, the pages displayed in the left-hand panel are highlighted accordingly.

Document-mapping features like these leave users with no doubt about where they are in the document at any point in time. Search operations are similarly slick: Conducting a search presents a series of matches that look familiar to anyone who uses Internet search engines. Selecting a match highlights it in the main document window.

Internally, all versions of 6.0 have been upgraded to support PDF 1.5, which Adobe says features a more robust internal compression algorithm.

For example, PDF 1.5 compresses all the data within a PDF, including accompanying tags, leading to leaner file sizes. PDF 1.5 also permits rich media formats such as MP3 and QuickTime to be embedded into a document, where they can be accessed via Reader 6.0.

Adobe Acrobat 6.0 Standard is priced at $299 while Professional is priced at $449. Users upgrading from a previous version will be charged $99 and $149, respectively. Acrobat Elements is licensed. A minimum order of 1,000 licenses is priced at $29 per seat.

Acrobat 6.0 is powerful, sleek and well designed. If you felt that Acrobat’s previous upgrade from 4.0 to 5.0 wasn’t really worthy, 6.0 should convince you this time. Far from just being a rejiggering of menus and the addition of a few new features, 6.0 is a real and complete makeover that seems well worth the investment.