Product Reviews

Just because you can't categorise Acrobat, that doesn't make it a niche product. In fact, it is the part of Adobe's portfolio enjoying runaway success in a dour commercial climate. For software best described as an office collaboration, document approval, Web publishing, prepress collation and cross-platform content delivery suite, it seems the market understands Acrobat rather well. So the significance of this much-anticipated upgrade - the first for nearly three years - can't be over-estimated. Here we put a pre-release beta version of Acrobat 6.0 Professional through its paces.
Apart from the introduction of a four-tier product line the big news for Mac users is that the package runs natively under Mac OS X. The update to Acrobat 5.05 only 'Carbonised' parts of the main package, leaving some plug-ins and the Distiller utility in Classic-only limbo. Features such as Edit Object are now working again.
Acrobat 6.0 Professional is designed for OS X, so generating PDFs from Classic applications will be as tricky as it was for Acrobat 5.0 to generate PDFs from OS X programs. It also means third-party plug-ins, such as Enfocus PitStop, won't work in Acrobat 6.0 Professional. On the other hand, we were pleased to find that most of our old user settings files from Acrobat 5.0, such as batch sequences and Distiller job options, work under the new version. Acrobat 6.0 Professional even updated our old digital certificate automatically.
Other benefits of the OS X clean sweep is that experimental features under Acrobat 5.05 such as the Microsoft Office PDF export toolbar now seem to work under version 6.0. You can generate a PDF from Microsoft Word X, Excel X or PowerPoint X with one click, whereupon the Adobe macro applies Distiller's current job options. The technology isn't as extensively implemented on the Mac as it is under the Windows edition, but simply having an Adobe PDF virtual printer installed for you in OS X for almost seamless access to Distiller is a great boon already. If you've set up a range of appropriate job options, all accessible from your Print dialogs, you may never have to launch Distiller at all.
Making plans
Acrobat 6.0 Professional introduces an upgraded version of the PDF file format. Among other new content features, PDF 1.5 supports layers. Judging from our tests with the beta software, this appears to be limited to PDFs generated from a small number of programs, in particular technical drawing programs including Microsoft Visio and Autodesk's AutoCAD. When you open the Layers navigation pane, you can show or hide individual layers, and even assign bookmarks to them. This is great for distributing complex diagrams in PDF format, as the recipients can navigate the layers using Adobe Reader 6.0 just as they might within Visio and AutoCAD. But before we can get excited about support for layers in the Acrobat 6.0 line-up, we want to see support for Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign layers on the Mac too. Maybe that's on the cards for those packages' updates.
Technical draughtsmen are served up plenty of fresh annotation tools in Acrobat 6.0 Professional. In addition to the existing set of highlighters, note windows, stamps and scribblers, the upgrade provides new drawing shapes including polygons, arrows and clouds. Also interesting are the Distance, Perimeter and Area measurement tools, which are ideal for precision scaled artwork.
Annotation and collaborative commenting have been given a boost. You can view pop-up previews of stamp designs within the menus rather than having to select them from a dialog window. Text can be annotated directly and you can type in extra text, leaving

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text insertion markers in the copy. A considerably revamped review process makes this kind of workflow far easier to track. Acrobat 6.0 Professional shows you not just who said what, but where the comments and insertions apply and in which order they were made.
Our only disappointment is that the ability to broadcast a single PDF on a Web server and invite your collaborators to annotate it through their browsers is only possible under Windows. Mac users must continue to email out multiple copies of the PDF and recombine the annotations into one file later. That said, Acrobat 6.0 Professional makes the process of emailing out to your remote colleagues simpler than before, so it's not a complete loss.
Create and deliver
Adobe has added plenty of built-in functionality to Acrobat 6.0 Professional to support PDF as a prepress delivery format. You can output colour separations complete with traps using host-based or Adobe In-RIP systems without any extra software. The package even includes InDesign 2.0's Ink Manager to help. The new preflighting feature is most striking of all: Acrobat 6.0 Professional has one of the most powerful we have seen. We'd need to test it much more to see if it can integrate with electronic workflows, but so far it looks first class.
Beyond these key additions, Adobe has packed in many enhancements. You can select multiple documents and convert the lot to a single PDF with one command. Acrobat 6.0 Professional lets you scan to indexable PDF via its built-in OCR engine, straight from the Create PDF button. You can run all comments attached to a PDF through a new spellchecker and, if you can't read the text in a PDF, you can trigger the OS X speech synthesis technology to read it aloud. If you haven't used Acrobat to create slide presentations, here's an incentive to try it: there are now 50 animated transition effects, and you can use a different one for each slide.
Sign here
Inevitably there are certain issues in the software that don't impress so readily. We feel Adobe might have missed the opportunity to clarify the digital signature features in the upgrade, even though it has clearly tried very hard with explanatory messages and wizard-like sequences. For us, the problem is that establishing the digital certificate is found under one menu, applying it is under another, the command for embedding a signature graphic is buried deep within several dialog windows, and by the time you've wrestled with all that, you've forgotten how you got there. The new Acrobat 6.0 Professional interface also seems to melange the concepts of digital certificates and security encryption at one point, which can be a source of further confusion.
Talking of the program interface, Acrobat has never fully conformed to the so-called Adobe 'standard', but Acrobat 6.0 Professional veers even further away from it. Unless Adobe plans on introducing the same style of toolbars, tabbed dialog windows and navigation buttons in the upgrades to its other software products, the changes are inexplicable. Strangest of all is the way all the floating palettes have been moved out of the Window menu, where you'd expect to find them, and distributed across all the other menus.
Another problem we could mention is performance, although we hope this is just an issue with the beta version which will be cleared up before release. Certainly, if you're used to opening PDFs within a couple of moments using Preview or Acrobat Reader 5.0, you'd be appalled at the 40 seconds it takes the Acrobat 6.0 Professional beta to launch - and this using a 867MHz G4 with 512Mb RAM. Matters can't be helped by the swelling of the disk space required: Acrobat 5.0 occupied less than 90Mb on our Mac but Acrobat 6.0 Professional takes up more than 330Mb.
Also swollen is the price. Acrobat 5.0 could be purchased for £195, while Acrobat 6.0 Professional is set at £355. This pushes the package out of the 'bargain essential' category and into 'desirable but optional' territory. We imagine that potential buyers who don't work in publishing will probably opt for the cheaper £235 Standard edition. But for those Web and prepress creatives who do, Acrobat 6.0 Professional is shaping up to be the must-have upgrade of the summer.