Acrobat Business Tools

As more business personnel collaborate on the creation of company documents, managers are constantly looking for ways to optimise workflow productivity and to ease the transition from traditional paper-based processes to that of the more efficient electronic form.

Adobe Acrobat Business Tools, a subset of Adobe Acrobat 4, contains many of Acrobat's extensive features and allows all collaborating authors to view, correct, reorganise and print any PDF document prior to distribution.

The main editing toolbar is situated on the left of the document window and comprises three types of annotation tools - Annotation, Graphic Mark-Up and Text Mark-Up.

Advising an author that text needs to be modified can be achieved in a variety of ways. Your comments can then be added and positioned near to the line of text you require amending. For added emphasis, other tools such as Highlight, Strike Through, and Underlined are also available.

Obviously, numerous alterations to text can easily cause confusion, especially if the screen is littered with sticky notes and highlighted text. A useful feature in this instance is Compare Document. No matter how many corrections you make, you can easily compare the copy you're currently working on with that of the original. Once satisfied with the alterations, one of 14 stamps may be applied to mark the document as confidential, approved and draft.

With so many personnel editing documents, it's vital to have some way of authenticating authorship. Business Tools provides this safeguard in the form of a self-sign signature. This comprises a 1,024-bit RSA private signing key and X.509 public key certificate. Adding a signature to a document requires no more effort than selecting the digital signature tool from the editing toolbar, creating a signature box and confirming user name and password details.

As well as being able to edit PDF documents created by your colleagues, Business Tools can also capture and download live Web pages, automatically converting them to PDF format. Then the downloaded pages can be scaled, have annotations added, printed and distributed or saved locally.

If, at a later date, you need to download additional links from the Web site, clicking the relevant hyperlink in the PDF file will start the download. After downloading additional pages the contents are automatically added to the end of your PDF file, keeping all Web content together. It's no longer necessary to save individual Web pages as separate files.

It's unfortunate that Business Tools only has the facility to convert downloaded Web pages to PDF format. If you intend creating your own PDF documents for distribution within your organisation, you'll find that you still need Adobe Acrobat 4.

Business Tools is generally uncomplicated to use. Should you experience problems, however, the excellent on-line manual should provide a suitable solution. At the time of writing, however, I was a little disappointed to find that when I clicked the link to the Acrobat Tour I got a message stating that it wasn't available.

Business Tools is a powerful utility, more at home in a business organisation than the average PC user's desktop. For the single user it's only available via download from the Adobe Web site, otherwise the Adobe volume-licensing program will cater for you. You can't convert newly created documents to PDF, but if you regularly edit PDF documents this is essential.

Author: John Barnett