Product Reviews

The Portable Document Format (PDF) has become the de facto standard for sharing complex documents with others. These compressed files can contain a range of elements from text to images, tables and forms, and you can share them with anyone who has the free Acrobat Reader software. Adobe's Acrobat Professional lets you create these documents, and the latest version, 7.0, offers new features to make it faster and more effective.

Acrobat 7.0 can grab information from a range of sources, including web pages, image files, emails and all Office applications. The Professional version also allows you to create intelligent forms.

Performance has been enhanced, making this the fastest version of the software. Adobe has also cut the length of time the application and its digital documents take to launch, as well as boosting the general responsiveness of the software.

Acrobat 7.0 Professional has extended the annotation options available to users of Reader 7. In the past, users of this free software were unable to save notes and comments on a PDF, but they can now benefit from full commenting

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functions. This should eliminate compatibility problems. For example, an architect can send an AutoCAD design to a client, who can then add their comments to the document without the need to install AutoCAD on their own PC.

Adobe LiveCycle Designer 7.0 enables you to create PDF forms that look just like the paper ones they replace. However, while Reader allows you to read and fill in forms and export elements from a completed form as XML, it still doesn't allow you to save the filled-in form.

Another minor irritation is that Adobe automatically adds Acrobat to your Startup items, which can slow the boot time of your PC and divert memory resources. Then again, removing it from the Startup folder solves this.

Other new features include tools for organising PDFs, which allow you to view a list of recently opened documents as thumbnails; support for attachments so you can add source documents such as spreadsheets and drawings; and embedded support for Photoshop Album slideshows and electronic cards.

But while this version has many new features, one thing has been removed and that's support for older versions of Windows. Only users of Windows XP or 2000 SP2 will be able to use the latest version of Acrobat, and files created with version 7 can only be viewed on these operating systems.

While users who have failed to make the leap may not be happy with this decision, we think that the number of enhancements and improvements present in version 7 more than outweighs the disadvantages presented by this limited support. But if you or those with whom you regularly share PDFs are still using older platforms, you're better off sticking with version 6 or below.