Adobe Acrobat 8 Announced

Adobe posts some information about the upcoming Acrobat 8, slated to be released later this year. The upgrade looks to be quite helpful for corporate environments, but not as important for creative professionals as the last upgrade.

Adobe Systems announced recently that their crown jewel of PDF authoring, the Acrobat application, would be moving on to version 8.

A RADICALLY EXPANDED FAMILY

The Acrobat family of products is getting a major makeover that foreshadows possible changes to other Adobe applications including the Creative Suite. Since version 6, Acrobat has been offered in Standard or Professional flavors (the Professional product having more features, of course). With the move to version 8, Adobe has increased the family from two members to six:

Acrobat 8 Elements:While Elements has been around since version 7, that version was only available through volume licensing in orders above 100. Now Elements is available to all, and will be available in mid-2007. This application is for those who need to move beyond the power of the Adobe Reader but only need to collaborate or create and protect PDFs.

Acrobat 8 Standard:The heir to Acrobat 7 Standard. This is for the regular user of Acrobat who needs a good complement of PDF authoring and editing tools but not necessarily all of them. If you’re using 7 Standard now, 8 Standard will probably suit you well in the future.

Acrobat 8 Professional:The heir to Acrobat 7 Professional. For top creative professionals and those who need to anything and everything that PDF can allow. I’ve noticed too that most of the new features for version 8 are available only in 8 Professional.

Acrobat 8 3D:The Acrobat 3D application was first released just last year with version 7, and now it grows to version 8. Note that the 3D application can do everything the Professional application can—and then some—so all the new features apply. Macintosh users, take note that it is still available only for Windows.

Acrobat 8 Connect:Connect is a new product that is designed to create real-time web conferencing, very useful for collaborating with PDF. Macromedia’s Breeze application did pretty much the same thing and, if the screenshots are any indication, this is pretty much the same product. Connect’s connection abilities are limited to 15 users.

Acrobat 8 Connect Pro:As with Acrobat before it, Connect has a standard and professional version. The professional version has a lot more features (see the comparison here) and can support as many users as you want (up to 2,500).

Along with the radically expanded family, you’ll notice the look and feel of the packaging has been revamped with a wispier look to the graphics and a new type treatment—all caps, with a new colored subhead. Please write in and tell us what you think of the new look!

SO WHAT’S NEW?

I’ve been somewhat curious as to why the Acrobat 8 announcement has not received a whole lot of speculation or press. Everyone uses PDF in some way and a lot of us use Acrobat every day, and yet this has been a ho-hum event for the creative professional community. I think part of it is attributed to the fact that version 8 won’t be released for a little while longer, but I also think it’s because there’s no new killer features for Acrobat with version 8 (the print production toolbar in version 7 was the last killer feature). That’s not the case for corporate and enterprise environments, though. Here’s the rundown of what to expect new in version 8. As mentioned before, it looks like a lot of these new features are available only with 8 Professional and 8 3D.

• PDF packages. Create a group of PDFs that serve as one searchable “document” but are comprised of multiple PDFs, each with their own security and restriction settings.
• Form field auto-recognize. Acrobat 8 can recognize form fields out of static PDF documents and convert them to PDF form fields, which are interactive.
• Conduct shared reviews.
• Sensitive information deletion. Acrobat 8 has become much more robust in permanently and thoroughly deleting sensitive text and illustrations.
• E-mail archive. This one is what excites me the most. Outlook and Lotus Notes users can direct Acrobat 8 to archive their e-mail directly from Outlook and Lotus Notes to PDF. Note that this is available to Windows users only. (Does anyone get the feeling that Adobe is miffed by Apple and their drawing blood with Aperture, Final Cut Pro, Shake, etc.?)
• Save PDF as Word documents. This gets me excited too. Get a PDF, save as Word with formatting and text intact. This is one I’ll probably have to see to believe, but InDesign imports Word quite well not so I have no reason not to believe Adobe can get it to work well.
• New interface. I haven’t seen it yet so I can’t comment, but from the description I’ve seen it sounds like the toolbars have been overhauled and a “Getting Started” page has been added so users can get where they need to quickly. I don’t find those kind of opening pages very useful, so we’ll see if this is a big benefit.

THE VERDICT

I’ve signed up for free trials of all the Acrobat 8 products, so I’ll try them out and follow up with an in-depth review. But from what I see so far, Acrobat 8 is going to be a big plus for some in the corporate world but not so much for creative professionals. We got our best toys with version 7, and now perhaps it’s time for corporate professionals to get their share of new features that make their work easier.