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I have to agree with most of this article
For a company that prides itself on its User interfaces, I can not understand how it makes such a hash of Acrobat's.
Every version I hope that the mess gets fixed, instead I find it has disappeared off in yet another wrong headed direction. I desperately wish for better selection, clearer tools and greater reliability only to once again be disappointed.
I did look forward to the few new improvements but the irritating waste of screen real estate (ex Microsoft programmers ?) and annoying cropping tools and Fronting pages put the kibosh on this for me.
I'll sit back in the vain hope that Adobe will fix this dog of a program, but given previous experience, I doubt it.
Look deeper
There are many features in Acrobat 8 Professional that the creative, print and prepress industry would find useful that were not mentioned in this review...
- Preflight and fix PDF files. Previous versions of Acrobat Professional introduced preflighting of PDF documents, but this version also includes many fixups, such as converting colors.
- Drag-and-drop INDD files into Acrobat 8 (or include them in the Merge PDF/PDF Package file list) to convert them to PDF there, without having to open the source file first then Export to PDF (this still requires InDesign to be installed on the local machine)
- Improved JDF workflow support, with the inclusion of INDD files within the job.
- Allowing a Reader user to be able to fill out a form, save it, digitally sign and add comments from within Acrobat Professional is HUGE!
Note: Acrobat Connect Professional supports both VOIP and telephone conferencing (Acrobat Connect does not support VOIP).
Did author Susan Glinert Stevens actually USE Acrobat 8?!
This is a very poorly researched review, as some it's obvious that she's never actually used Acrobat in the past: Things she claimed are new - have been there for at least 3 versions.
Also, she TOTALLY MISSED a variety of new features for the prepress community; and she couldn't find menu items right in front of her face.
See above
See above
Forms features are big improvement
I haven't been able to fully test V8 yet, but one feature that is VERY helpful to me is the ability to create forms that Reader users can fill out and save (not just print). I was able to create a business card order form for my company, send it to all staff to fill out and send back to me, use Acrobat's new "compile database" feature to create an Excel file. Then I was able to use InDesign's built-in automation features (under Data Merge) to lay out 150 cards in 30 seconds flat!! This is reason enough for me to upgrade to Acrobat 8 because this feature has many possible applications to save time for an in-house design department.