Ordinarily one greets a software maker's pronouncement that the latest version of its product has "major interface improvements" with all the enthusiasm one accords to being told "it won't hurt a bit" or "the price is a bargain." But Adobe Systems has broken with long-standing software tradition and produced Acrobat 6.0 with a thorough interface overhaul that actually has made it easier to use.

The product ships in two flavors: Standard at $250 (street price) and and Professional at $380. Upgrades are $83 and $126 respectively. Acrobat Elements, a stripped down version, that mainly is designed for creating PDFs in Microsoft Office applications is only available to enterprise customers buying 1,000 or more copies. For whatever marketing reason, Adobe has left the end-user market to third party programs such as Jaws PDF or Easy PDF Creator.

Adobe posts a comparison chart regarding the various versions here. Most users will find more than enough functionality in Standard. Professional's major additions are the ability to create electronic forms, support for Visio and Project, and added multimedia and pre-press (preparation for professional print jobs).

For this test, I looked at Standard on the Mac and Professional for Windows. As I wrote about an earlier version, the PDF format has become increasing essential as computing evolves. PDF's long-standing advantage of cross platform compatibility now extends to Unix, Linux, Palm OS, Pocket PC, and others as well as multiple versions of Windows and Mac. PDF has become essentially the main medium of exchange between the graphics/creative world and content/business workers, with everything from web sites to letterheads being rendered in Acrobat by creative shops to show to their clients.

The centerpiece new feature of 6.0 is electronic collaboration capabilities. You can send a document you've created out to other Acrobat 6.0 users for comments via email or Web browser and the software allows you to easily import the comments into your document. Essentially it brings Microsoft Office-type collaboration into the .PDF world, allowing for non-Microsoft products to be part of the mix. This, of course, also highlights PDF's long-standing advantage of ensuring that readers see the layout, fonts, and so forth just the way you created them.

In a computing world where content piracy has run amok and protecting intellectual property is a constant struggle, Acrobat 6.0 provides multi-level security options -- everything from preventing editing all the way to blocking saving, printing, or even copying.

Acrobat 6.0 also makes a major advance in user-friendliness, which you will see the moment you first up the application. There are colorful XP or OS-X style icons, which seem to be de rigueur in software of late. The menus and toolbars now are in actual English ("Create a PDF") instead of the Acrobat geek-speak of prior versions. And right there along the right side of your screen is a "How to..." bar that--yes, you guessed it--tells how to do perform the major Acrobat tasks.

Acrobat 6.0 installs macros, toolbar buttons, and menu item in most Microsoft Office applications so you can create .PDF files within the native software. This support now includes Outlook and Internet Explorer. As always, Acrobat configures itself as a printer driver. The default settings for these mechanisms are more logical and the dialog boxes for changing the defaults guide you through making changes--how to reduce file size, for example, or to optimize for print vs. monitor display.

In a long overdue change, you can now easily create .PDFs from within Acrobat, especially multi-file documents. A simple dialog lets you assemble disparate content and fold them into one Acrobat file. Also long overdue: You can now save a file to Microsoft Word format.

It is a dramatic transformation. Where prior releases pretty much assumed that the heavy lifting of .PDF creation would be the province of a specialist/geek in your office, 6.0 makes sophisticated changes accessible to most business users. Actually, it makes not-so-sophisticated changes more accessible as well. For instance, in older releases I never could get the hang of setting up files so that the initial view of the document when opened would be what I wanted; now that is a snap.

(c) 2004 Al Gordon.

In addition to his computer interests, Al Gordon is a principal in the Boston-area strategic consulting firm, Mary Fifield Associates, www.maryfifieldassociates.com

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You can reach Al Gordon at:

al@tnpcnewsletter.com