Product Reviews

Hot on the heels of Photoshop 6.0, Premiere 6.0 and After Effects 5.0 comes a welcome smartening up of Acrobat and the Portable Document File (PDF) format. This new release fixes several long-running niggles and improves on its multi-user and forms capabilities.

Acrobat isn't easy to categorise. For prepress professionals, it's a compact and PostScript-clean document format for handling and delivering print jobs. For designers, it can be used for electronic proof approval. For office workers, it can be a collaborative, document sharing system. For everybody, it's a cross-platform format for CD manuals and Web brochures. Version 5.0 improves things in all these areas.

The new release introduces version 1.4 of the PDF format, which implements an XML description of the document hierarchy. Skilled XML developers should now be able to integrate Acrobat into ever-more-complex XML-based content workflows. The new format supports double-byte characters, which will please anyone using Asian script fonts, as well as more intelligent handling of font descriptions. In principle, there should be less hassle with different fonts which happen to have the same name across platforms.

All together now

A number of other added functions are going to go down well with those working with PDF in prepress and design. You can carry out a number of batch tasks to multiple PDFs in one go, saving you the trouble of having to re-distil the lot if, for example, you set the wrong security options the first time around. It's also possible to show documents in a colour managed preview mode, with paper colour simulation and spot colour overprints, which was previously only possible within the expensive Acrobat InProduction applications. And Acrobat 5.0 at last lets you tile large document pages across printed sheets, where before you had to shrink the entire page to fit.

That said, you've been able to do all these things in Acrobat 4.0 with the help of third-party plug-ins. Getting them as part of the main program is obviously attractive, but not a great incentive to upgrade if you've already spent the money.

PDF-for-approval workflows have been boosted with better collaborative features. You get the same set of highlighters and annotation tools as before, but this time you can use them from within a Web browser. Just as importantly, it's now possible for more than one networked person to access the same PDF from the server at one time. So while you can continue to send out copies of a PDF to colleagues and then combine all the annotations into a single report document, you can just as easily post a single PDF on a Web site and tell everyone to access it directly.

As you can imagine, this could be especially handy for filling out electronic forms, so it's no surprise Adobe has added muscle to Acrobat's forms capability. The XML core of the documents allows forms to be served from WebDAV databases, even supporting forms that update themselves dynamically in accordance to the way the user is filling out the fields.

Protect

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and serve

Better forms alone isn't enough: to be really useful, forms and other official documents need to be secure. Until now, password protection in Acrobat has been rudimentary and its content security a joke. All you had to do to take ownership of an edit-protected document was print it through your own copy of Acrobat Distiller, after which you could then edit and republish it, maliciously or otherwise, pretending to be the original author. Acrobat 5.0 puts an end to this gaping loophole with sensible 128-bit password security, plus the ability to offer a more flexible variety of edit-print-copy access options for users. If you try to re-distil a protected document, Acrobat knows what you're up to and the job will be aborted.

Another security issue concerns digital signatures. These were introduced with Acrobat 4.0, but version 5.0 makes them much easier to understand and implement. The program supports PKI self-sign and certificate authorities, such as Verisign, CIC and Entrust. Combined with the superior encryption already mentioned, this may at last persuade the Inland Revenue and Customs & Excise that PDF is a viable format for distributing, completing and collecting tax forms wholly electronically.

Once and for all

For the PDF creator, Acrobat is much more flexible, too. Although not yet fully implemented in the pre-release version we tested, Acrobat 5.0 will install the Create Adobe PDF driver as standard for one-step PDF generation without having to worry about Distiller. Once you've set up your Distiller Job Options, you may never have to run the program again.

Better still, Acrobat 5.0 will open a number of common document formats directly (including text, GIF, JPEG, PNG and TIFF) and let you save them as PDFs. You can, of course, still open Web sites in Acrobat complete with links, just as you could in version 4.0. The program is similarly well prepared for exporting content: individual graphics can be extracted if security access allows, and pages or documents can be resaved as JPEG, PNG, TIFF, EPS and raw PostScript. One nice feature is the ability to export an entire PDF's text content to Rich Text File (RTF) format so it can be opened, edited and printed using any modern word processor, or brought into a fresh QuarkXPress or InDesign layout.

Behind these new features is a very slightly refreshed interface - so slight that some users won't even notice. There are more buttons around the edge of the program window for viewing options, for example, and the main tool palette is presented by default as a Microsoft Office-style ribbon bar. Nested bookmarks can be given colours and styles to indicate levels, and page thumbnails are now generated on the fly, without you having to save them as part of the PDF. We also found some interesting new plug-ins, including one called PictureIt, which compares the visual content of two PDFs to identify differences.

Unless Adobe plans to break from tradition, we don't expect to see a printed manual supplied in the final boxed version of Acrobat 5.0. The lack of a tangible handbook or a tutorial for such a deep and complex application is a shame.

On the other hand, you're unlikely to find a more powerful and versatile package for as little money as this anywhere. It's cheap enough to install network-wide, and can transform the way you collaborate with colleagues and customers alike. Acrobat 5.0 makes creating, editing, distributing and extracting cross-platform documents for everyday business and graphics easier and more reliable than ever.

PowerPC Mac, 16Mb free memory, 105Mb disk space, Mac OS 8.6