Acrobat 9 Pro Extended: a first look
Published: 13 Jun 2008
Adobe's Acrobat 9 document-creation software is adding dynamic features such as animation integration, dynamic maps, 256-bit encryption and improved forms. We've been playing with the beta edition of Acrobat 9 Pro Extended.
Acrobat 9 comes in three versions, which are set to ship in the coming weeks: Standard at £265 (ex. VAT) or £85 to upgrade, Pro for £425 or £145 to upgrade, and Pro Extended for £619 or £205 to upgrade. Pro Extended also comes with Adobe Presenter, which plugs into Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 for adding interactivity to presentations.
Acrobat 9 features PDF Portfolios, which let you package video and animation alongside audio content and even 3D models.
Integrating with Acrobat 9 is Adobe's beta release of an online community, Acrobat.com. It includes the Buzzword word processor with collaboration features as well as 5GB of file storage, and conversion of five documents to Portable Document Format (PDF). Its ConnectNow Web conferencing and desktop sharing tool enables chatting via text, video and voice. The site can also host data from forms created in Acrobat software.
PDF is moving from its focus on print-readiness to a venue for multimedia content. For the first time, PDFs will play movies. Acrobat users can convert MOV and WMV files to Flash content that can be embedded within PDFs alongside audio content and even 3D models. The free Acrobat Reader 9 will play the movies, eliminating the need to open other media players. Developers can tweak layouts with Flex Builder 3 or Flash CS3.
The new PDF Portfolios feature in Acrobat 9 lets users drag and drop content into a portfolio, and then choose from myriad layout and presentation options. Adobe has also tried to make it easier to for companies to make pages match visually with themes and custom logos, and has improved the tools for comparing documents.
Geospatial mapping is cool in this update, but it's only available in the pricey Acrobat 9 Pro Extended.
Mapping features only in Acrobat Pro Extended 9 preserve geospatial coordinates and let users mark locations and measure distances. These tools are cool, but we wish you didn't need to pay £619 for Pro Extended to use them.
The next Acrobat will take snapshots of web pages and convert entire pages or chunks of them to a PDF that preserves links and animation.
For creating online forms, Acrobat 9 adds intelligence to recognise content for conversion to fillable fields. And a forms-tracking dashboard will show, for instance, the status of responses to a mass party invitation email and let a user send reminders to guests. Responses can be sorted, filtered, and exported to spreadsheets.
Acrobat 9's security enhancements enable users to add 256-bit encryption — used by banks online — to PDFs. Business users could opt to access documents at Acrobat online or via SharePoint workspaces, network folders or WebDAV.
Redaction tools, a key selling point of Acrobat 8, will offer searches for numeric patterns in addition to multiple words and phrases. A company could, for example, find every accidental mention of a Social Security number or top-secret product being developed and black out the potential leaks from a PDF with one blow.
We'll have a review of Acrobat 9 software once we receive final code.
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