Wednesday 31 August 2005, 8:11 PM

Adobe Going the Way of Quark

Adobe has missed a couple of complete no-brainers on this one.

A) Their much-hyped enabling of the comments tool in Acrobat Reader 7 - a great idea for editors - needs to be turned on manually for every PDF you create. There's no way to set it up in your distiller preferences, so that it automatically enables all the pdfs you make.

B) You can no longer summarize comments on just the pages with comments on them. You MUST summarize all the pages. That means creating a 200 page document to get the 100 pages of comments you made. A recipe for missing edits if you ask me.

And Adobe seems hell-bent on pissing off customers who want some advice on their newest offerings. First I was threatened with a possible $40 service fee. Then, I was told that they could tell me how to do it, but it would cost me. When I challenged them on it, they came back and said 'sorry, you actually can't do that in this version.' I still suspect they would have told me how to do it if I had agreed to pay the $40.

But then they said I could request that feature in their features request department, which led me to some scared, anonymous girl on the line who had no idea what I was talking about. She then spoke to her boss and informed me that there is no features requests department. All requests had to be sent in by snail mail (there is a page on their site to fill in such things, but they declined to actually tell me that).

All I can say, is that it looks like Adobe's next stop is India, for customer service calls, right beside the Quark call centre. Then, it's into the great trash heap of history.

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