Adobe Acrobat is by now the industry standard for publishing electronic documents. It does this by creating PDF files from any Microsoft package or by scanning
in printed material from a hard copy.Acrobat was one of the first successful attempts to publish formatted material across all platforms, including UNIX. The Acrobat 3.0 release adds numerous features and
concentrates on promoting its ability to print documents directly to the web.
Acrobat 3.0 combines separate programs: Exchange, for editing; Distiller, for converting PostScript into Acrobat forms; PDFWriter, a
printer driver and several other plug-ins. It is still clumsy and requires the user to leap back and forth between Distiller and Exchange in order to create a Portable Document Format (PDF) file; something that should
be ironed out in the 4.0 release.
Nonetheless, with some smart marketing by
Adobe, and offering Acrobat Reader as a free download, has allowed Acrobat to establish itself as the most popular cross-platform publishing package on the Internet. Acrobat can be used for a range of
media including CD-ROM, E-mail, Networks and even remote printing.
Acrobat allows you to create documents that combine forms to be filled out by users, complete with table of contents, cross referencing,
hyperlinks and index control. Acrobats strengths are its ability to retain the original document formatting of a file, for example, a document created in Word, and publish it successfully across all platforms.
For large companies that need to publish material in various operating systems and working environments, Acrobat has many obvious advantages.
The Acrobat 3.0 improvements can be seen especially in Distiller.
Forms are now easier to create and major enhancements have been made to web related options as well as to image and text control.
New features in Exchange include bookmarking and thumbnail creation.
Catalog allows you to scan in pages or text and convert them into character data using OCR. Catalog also allows full-text indices for collection of PDF files that allow users to search through files with
powerful queries.
The process of creating a PDF file will hopefully become easier in the 4.0 release. For now you have to create the form in the word processor
and then load it into Exchange. Once there you can tailor the document to your needs by adding the forms, hyperlinks or buttons. Acrobat has other features that can jazz up the document including opening other
PDF files within the same window, playing sounds or movies (ideal for training demos).
Adobe has a vested interest in web development and so Acrobat 3.0 is
orientated towards capturing this market. Adobe's web-site offers many articles as download in PDF format thus encouraging the medium. To download a document you have to first download the Acrobat Reader -
this allows you to read anything published in PDF format.
Unfortunately PDF documents have a hard time with font rendering and downloads are difficult to read; they tend to appear blurred. There is the
option to zoom in which does improve the clarity at the expense of screen space.
Security features in Acrobat allow you to save the document so that it
cannot be printed. Both text and images can also be disallowed from being selected with a cursor: one possible solution for authors concerned about intellectual copyrights.
