Acrobat Shows Staying Power

If he or she who laughs last, laughs best, then they really must be yukking it up at Adobe Systems, Inc.

Over the years, "experts" have forecast that Acrobat--the company's "portable document" software--would have a limited lifespan. With Microsoft Office dominating word processing and spreadsheets, surely users would make Word and Excel the default standard for distributing documents electronically. Then, the thinking went, the ubiquity of HTML Internet formatting would make that the standard.

Buzz! Nope.

If anything, the Internet has made Acrobat use even more widespread. It has become the method of choice for distributing documents online. Everyone from the IRS to anarchists, it seems, has the familiar Acrobat logo on their web pages. Adobe also has moved into the handheld world, with Reader software for both the Palm and Pocket PC platforms.

Adobe released its latest version of Acrobat, 5.0 last year, and earlier this year, updated that to 5.0.5 to support Microsoft Office XP and Windows XP. Pricing is $250 for the full version, and $100 for the upgrade. [Now replaced by Acrobat 6.0, for details please click here.]

I confess to having once been one of the skeptics. I regarded Word as a more useful way to circulate materials, and considered making Acrobat files mainly as an annoying extra process to go through to put items up on Web pages. Then, I had a major "well, duh!" moment... One of the things that had bothered me about Acrobat was that it prevents readers from altering content. That is a minus with documents that are works in progress, for which edits are expected. But then came a day when I needed to distribute materials that I wanted the readers to keep their hands off of. Suddenly--duh!--Acrobat's minus became a major plus.

A similar moment came when I had carefully laid out a document using special fonts and then realized that if I sent it out as a Word file, those fonts would most likely be transmuted to Times New Roman or Arial. In Acrobat, the fonts can be made part of the package.

Acrobat actually is several applications: The heavy lifting is done by "DISTILLER," a virtual printer driver, which converts PostScript (Adobe's printer file standard) into PDF. It will show up in your printer options menu, and "printing" a file to that driver creates an Acrobat file. "PDF MAKER" is a another virtual printer specific to Microsoft Office users. Essentially it is Distiller with added capabilities to read Office formatting. ADD- INS for the key Office applications are installed during setup and allow users to create PDF via menus and toolbars in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Finally, there is the ACROBAT APPLICATION itself, which looks superficially like the familiar Reader but has the ability to make layout, indexing, and security changes in PDF files.

For sheer simplicity, though, most users likely will create PDF files from inside Office. The process is:

1) Have the document open on screen.

2) Click the "Convert to Adobe pdf" icon on the toolbar.

3) A standard "save as" dialog box appears for you to set a file name and location.

3) PDFMaker runs and shows you a progress bar while it makes the file.

Now you're done. Particularly cool is the support for PowerPoint 2002's transition effects. It works equally as well as the Microsoft PowerPoint Viewer, the alternate tool for showing presentations on PCs without PowerPoint. The Acrobat menu in an Office application lets you set most key PDF options, including key security settings and choosing to open the new file in the Acrobat application.

Acrobat's key advantages are:

-- Your layouts and formatting show up on other PCs exactly as they do on yours. (In native Office format, the appearance would be dependent on the printer drivers and font selections on the other PCs.)

-- Your documents are indexed and bookmarked to ease the reader's navigation. In Word, for example, your headings get translated into bookmarks automatically.

-- You can limit the ability of readers to copy, print, or extract text and graphics from the file... in other word, block theft of your work.

-- Most print shops, copy centers, and service bureaus can do professional printing from PDF files and preserve the layouts as you created them.

And that is not even getting to the high-end professional capabilities such as creating forms and providing for digital signatures.

The main negative is price. While the cost has come down over the years, $250 is still expensive for users who aren't making Acrobat files constantly. I would like to see a "lite" version of Acrobat--essentially the functionality in the Office PDF Maker macros--made available at a lower price, much as Adobe offers Photoshop Elements as an alternative to Photoshop for non- graphics-professional users.

All-in-all, Acrobat has made good on Adobe's promise to set the standard for electronic document distribution.

You can reach Al Gordon at:
mailto:al@tnpcnewsletter.com