EXCLUSIVES

Adobe Acrobat Professional 6
Words by Trey Yancy
January 2004

Over the past decade, Adobe Acrobat has grown from a simple document-sharing tool to become the heart of many high-end document production and prepress workflows. If half a billion Reader downloads is any indication, Acrobat has become ubiquitous. Now at version 6, this product is available in several varieties. In addition to Reader and Distiller, the editing component of Acrobat has been split into three versions: the welterweight Acrobat Standard, the enterprise-oriented Acrobat Elements, and the flagship version, Acrobat Professional.

Acrobat 6 Professional for Macintosh contains quite a few important enhancements, a couple of quirks, and a slight disparity of features when compared to the Windows version. Among the many features are improved commenting and review capabilities, expanded security, enhanced support for creating PDFs from other applications, serious preflighting tools, and a revamped interface.

Features

The change in interface is first thing veteran Acrobat users will notice. Basic tools such as the magnifying glass and the hand tool have been moved to specialized docked tool bars. The workflow-centric tool arrangement has been replaced with one that organizes tools into families by task. The new arrangement is ideal for Acrobat workflows, allowing users to focus on a specialized range of tasks without being distracted by nonessential tools.

The commenting tools in version 6 pro are quite sophisticated. The emailing of PDFs can be initiated from within Acrobat, which launches your IMAPI-compliant email app, creates a message with boilerplate how-to instructions and attaches the PDF. The recipient can add comments to the PDF and send the result back in the more efficient form of a FDF (foreign document) file containing a reference to the original PDF along with the edits, comments and such, which are reintegrated with the original document upon receipt. This system incorporates a virtual paper trail that can be viewed via a tracker window that also includes a button for inviting other participants into the workflow.

Along with the traditional magnifying glass and page-fit tools, there are now loupe and dynamic zoom tools. With dynamic zoom, you click on the page and scrub the mouse to set the magnification of a live-updating proxy image that quickly displays a low-resolution image and then fills in the detail. Clicking on the document with the loupe tool summons a resizeable floating window with a zoom slider at the bottom. You can move the cursor around the screen and see a dynamically updating close-up.

Acrobat also includes a split screen feature by which the users can drag the top right corner of the document window to create a resizeable second window with independent content.

Another nice feature is the ability to preflight a document from within Acrobat. Choose a profile from an editable list and Acrobat steps you through each potential problem while navigating through the PDF to show the element in question. Many predefined profiles are available and custom profiles are easily created by selecting rules and conditions from some 400 variables.

Printing features are also enhanced with this release, allowing the user to access all job and PostScript options from within the OS X print dialogue box. You can then save these settings and you can export them as well. New job options include printing separations directly from Acrobat, flattening transparency, and more. You can also password-protect the job settings, making it possible, for example, for a customer to view a finished job at full resolution onscreen but only print at low resolution until the invoice is paid.

Other noteworthy features include the ability to easily create a single PDF from multiple sources, the creation of PDFX and PDFX1A certified PDFs, improved internal and external search capabilities, a built-in how-to window, the ability to easily embed QuickTime and Flash content, built-in OCR with an accuracy rate similar to dedicated OCR applications and the ability to click on a hyperlink to embed linked pages.

Observations

It should be noted that Acrobat 6 requires OS X 10.2.2 or later. It does not include installers for Classic, thereby eliminating the easy-to-use but sometimes finicky Acrobat virtual printer. Instead, users of classic applications must print to disk and send the file through Distiller in OS X (now back as a cocoa app).

Speaking of OS X, the user should note its integrated PDF creation engine does not create PDFs that are up to the latest spec, nor are they as compact as those created by Acrobat. In light of this, users of Microsoft Office and a select few other applications will be happy to hear that Acrobat 6 offers a save-as-PDF option.

While probing Acrobat for idiot-proofing, I happened to discover a booby trap hiding among the toolbars. The user is free to turn off toolbars if desired, but rather than having a series of simple recall buttons, the user can only call up a missing toolbar by navigating through menus. Say that the magnifying glass tool is active and you dismiss the basic tool palette, close your PDF, and then access Acrobat's PDF-based help system. You will find yourself stuck with the magnifying glass and no access to toolbar menus. The only way out is to open an editable PDF file and access the tool menus from there. Idiots are hereby advised to avoid the above pitfall.

Conclusions

Acrobat 6 Professional is a worthy upgrade and has what it takes to persuade many more workgroups to take the plunge into a near-paperless workflow. I encountered only two problems, one being the hidden toolbar problem and the other the inability to grab certain web page content that an older version subsequently handled with ease. Other than these concerns, and a slight features disparity between the Mac and Windows versions, I have no serious complaints and a great deal of praise.

Acrobat 6 Professional > Pros: Range of enhancements, preflighting > Cons: Hidden toolbar gotcha, no Classic support > Price: $449, upgrade $149 > From: Adobe adobe.com/acrobat