Adobe Acrobat and its PDF
format has become the standard in electronic document delivery because of its
ease of use, portability, and reliability. If you're only familiar with Acrobat
from receiving PDF files or by downloading its ubiquitous helper application,
Acrobat Reader, then you need to familiarize yourself with the full-featured
program. Acrobat is the core application that allows you to create rich
documents that can contain images, smart links, bookmarks, form data, comments,
handwritten scribbles, sound and movie clips, secure digital signatures, file
attachments, and JavaScript. The PDFs created by Acrobat are ideal for
collaboration: They can be annotated by multiple users, easily transferred by
e-mail, and distributed via the Web.
With the release of
Acrobat 5.0, Adobe both broadens and deepens the software's remarkable
functionality, adding important new security features, export filters,
document-repurposing options, workgroup-collaboration features, and other
enhancements. In short, if you use Acrobat, consider this a must-have upgrade.
And if you don't use Acrobat yet, this may the time to take it for a spin.
Repurposing Content
If you tend to think of Acrobat as a mechanism for electronic publishing, you'll
likely be thrilled with version 5.0's ability to tag PDFs. Of the three types of
PDF documents (unstructured, structured, and tagged), the latter two document
types contain information that make it easier to repurpose the file for another
use, such as converting paper documents to Web-based content. Structured
documents must be created in a special program such as
Adobe FrameMaker, but tagged PDF files are created automatically when a
Web page is saved to PDF or when you use the included PDF Maker application
within Office 2000.
The glory of tagging lets
you create documents that can be reflowed easily to accommodate different media
or devices. You might, for example, want a slightly different viewing order for
files served as an e-book or Web page. In a tagged file, all style elements are
defined as tags and will appear as a hierarchical list within the Tags palette.
This new Tags palette makes it easy to keep track of and apply associated
styles.
Media Flexibility
Acrobat 5.0 also boasts new-found flexibility with its ability to save PDFs in
various non-native formats. In contrast to previous versions, Acrobat 5.0 lets
you save files to any of numerous formats, including RTF, EPS, and PS. You can
also save PDF files as images, using TIFF, JPEG, or PNG format. When saving to
image formats, each page is output as a separate file, but there is ample
provision for adjusting output settings such as resolution, compression, and
color space; Acrobat 5.0 uses the same Adobe Color Engine as
Illustrator 9.0 and Photoshop
6.0. In addition, you can extract images contained in any PDF file to
JPG, PNG, or TIF, which is useful for recapturing artwork in editable form.
We were pleased with the results we got when converting PDFs to all these
formats and were especially impressed with Acrobat's export speed. We also
adored the fact that embedded images can be edited in an external program -- for
example, Illustrator or Photoshop. And Acrobat now supports transparency, so you
can work with PDFs using transparencies created in Illustrator 9.0 or Photoshop
6.0.
Feel Secure
The most ambitious and important addition to version 5 may be the host of
security enhancements, which include support for 128-bit encryption and
extensive support for the use of digital signatures and security certificates
(public keys). Acrobat 5.0 gives you the flexibility to specify what actions
readers will be able to take on a given PDF when you create it. For example, you
can decide whether or not readers should be able to print a file, and you might
allow them to add comments but not actually change the content of a document.
Acrobat 5.0 lets you create a digital signature with either Acrobat's own
Self-Sign Security system or use third-party certificates from companies such as
VeriSign. Such signatures may be placed into a
signature form field, to digitally sign a document and ensure your changes are
preserved. If further changes are made, you can roll back to the version you
signed. For example, we were sent a tax form in PDF format and were told to
print it out and fax it back. Instead, we used the Form Tool to block out form
fields in the document, and then we filled them in, added a secure digital
signature, and e-mailed the document back to the client.
Version 5 lets you review all the signatures within a document, retrieve any
version, and compare any two signed versions, and you can verify digital
signatures via a user certificate that the signer gives you. This latest Acrobat
also lets you use the certificates of other people when you encrypt a document,
so that only they can decrypt the file. And to make exchanging public keys
easier, Adobe built in the ability to exchange keys via e-mail from within the
program.
Collaborative Effort
Adobe has made it easy for workgroups to share PDFs over the Internet using
WebDAV (Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning) support. Your workgroup will
simply need a shared data repository such as a network folder or ODBC database.
And you can annotate and sign PDFs from within your browser: The Acrobat
toolbars and navigation pane appear in your browser, below your browser's
toolbars.
We also liked the ability to embed an Acrobat-created form on any Web page,
which is especially useful for companies that want to store commonly used forms
on-line and maintain the appearance of the corporate paper equivalent. Form data
can be submitted over the Web and collected in a database, just as if you were
using HTML forms. Acrobat can import and export form data, so you can fill out
disparate forms with the same set of data. For example, a user can enter
commonly requested info once -- name, address, and so on -- and then reuse use
the data in other forms.
Form fields may be assigned many parameters. For example, you can set a field
type for Text, List Box, or Radio Button and designate formats such as Number or
Date for text fields. And in version 5, user-entered form data may be validated
by rules you establish, and simple calculations may be carried out to generate
sums, products, and averages or to display minimums and maximums. If you are
fluent in JavaScript, you can also create a custom calculation script, for
example, that automatically e-mails a form or hides a field until a specific
condition is met.
And There's More
Adobe added many more features to this mammoth upgrade. For instance, Acrobat 5
integrates particularly nicely with Microsoft Office via a separate toolbar and
a menu option for generating and e-mailing PDFs. You can specify conversion
settings (which are actually the list of Distiller Job Options); set security
and Office integration parameters; define how you want bookmarks converted; and
select display options. We converted a 120-page, graphics-heavy document into
PDF in about two minutes, complete with style tags, bookmarks, comments (which
are converted to annotations), and links. We were impressed with Acrobat's
ability to maintain all these extras, as well as the speedy conversion process.
You can now use batch processing to automate nearly any series of operations
that you need to apply to a high volume of files. And Enhanced output controls
give you much greater flexibility when proofing output or submitting PDFs to
service bureaus. The Print dialog box lets you specify overlap and whether to
use ICC profiles, halftones, transfer functions, and undercolor removal/black
generation. You can preview overprinting onscreen or by printing to a composite
printer, and a nifty option helps you print oversized output on 8.5-by-11-inch
printers by tiling the job onto multiple letter-size sheets.
