Entered CNET Catalog: 05/22/2003
SKU: VS22020031
Manufacturer: Adobe Systems
Manufacturer description
Adobe Acrobat Professional software enables business, creative, and engineering professionals to exchange critical documents reliably and efficiently. It offers Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) file creation from any document, and one-button creation from Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Visio, and AutoCAD, preserving layers and supporting large-format drawings. Acrobat Professional streamlines document reviews to meet tight deadlines and offers built-in preflighting for reliable final output. It's easy for users to reliably exchange documents of all types with Acrobat Professional and Adobe PDF. Take advantage of enhanced viewing and printing support for large-format documents, and quickly combine multiple documents from different sources. Output PDF/X-compliant files and preflight final files before sending them to your prepress partner. Acrobat Professional provides intuitive methods for initiating, participating in, and tracking document reviews. Automatically create a list of participating reviewers and track their feedback. Conduct reviews using e-mail or, in Windows, through a Web browser, where participants can simultaneously view and respond to one another's comments. Add comments using robust electronic tools and quickly view, sort, and filter feedback, and then automatically incorporate it into original Microsoft Word files. Create interactive forms to simplify processes in small workgroups. Paper archives take up valuable office and storage space and are nearly impossible to search in a hurry. With Adobe Acrobat Professional, you can create an electronic repository of draft and final versions of documents - layouts, schematics, bids, and Web pages - all in Adobe PDF. You don't have to worry about lost file folders, missing fonts, or outdated application versions. The content of Adobe PDF files can be indexed and searched for speedy retrieval, and document security features help prevent archived files from unauthorized access.CNET editors' review
- Editors' Choice: No
- Reviewed on: 07/21/2003
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| Adobe completely updated Acrobat's interface, with detachable menus such as the Commenting toolbar, plus enhanced editing functionality and stamps. | Acrobat 6.0 makes it easy to select files from different applications to create a composite. Here we see AutoCAD, Visio, Excel, Word, and JPEG files. |
Beyond these bumps, Acrobat offers dramatically improved operation and interface. When installed, Acrobat adds a PDF creation button to most Microsoft Office programs (but no other office suites), supplementing the more familiar option to print to PDF via the print dialog. You can also create PDF files by right-clicking files in Windows Explorer, or you can select attachments in Outlook that Acrobat will automatically convert.
Adobe also completely redesigned the main Acrobat interface with detachable menus clustered by functions, such as Review And Comment, Create PDF, and Advanced Editing. A Help bar sits on the right for quick access--especially handy for beginners.
Some functions, such as aggregating several different document types into one PDF file, are now exceptionally simple. Just select the documents in their original formats (Excel, PowerPoint, Word, Visio, Project, AutoCAD, or image files in several formats) and Acrobat will load the original applications, produce the PDFs, then assemble them. Unfortunately, if you're creating layered PDFs, which contain multiple layers that viewers can toggle on and off with simple viewing controls, Acrobat isn't as smooth. For example, you can create a layered PDF file from AutoCAD and Visio only by using the PDF creation button--not from within Acrobat or when printing to PDF from within the program.
In addition, Acrobat's work flow process runs counter to most content-creation programs. For example, in Photoshop or Premiere, you load a file, edit, then render (save) to a file. With Acrobat, you choose your settings, then load the file, which Acrobat then converts to PDF. Then, you save your file. This could frustrate users who want to use Acrobat's new PDF optimization tools (more on that in the Features section) because, essentially, you must choose your encoding parameters twice and risk multiple compressions, which can degrade quality.
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 Viewing layers in an AutoCAD 2002 drawing. |
Several of Acrobat 6.0's new features are extraordinarily useful. For example, Acrobat 6.0 Standard offers much-improved document review capabilities: you can perform most edits directly into the underlying text, approve them, then export them back into Word. More importantly, Acrobat sets up an excellent document-review work flow that works with Outlook and other mail programs to track who has received the document and responded. To simplify editing, Acrobat transmits the PDF to the reviewers, who send back only their annotations. Acrobat then creates a compound document in which you can review all comments at once or individual comments by reviewer. With Word, you'd have to send everyone the same file, then compile the various changes.
If you're working in Internet Explorer, Acrobat 6.0 can quickly convert Web pages into PDF, creating either one composite file or separate files for each page. The PDF documents maintain most HTML links (though some JavaScript links may be lost), and it can also store rich media files such as Flash and animated GIFs.
Acrobat 6.0 Professional appeals to architects or power Visio users, too, because it can capture and present data in layers. Creating a layered PDF file from either application is simple: you load the file, click the Acrobat button, and follow simple prompts to select the layers to include in the PDF file.
Note, however, that you can't yet produce layered files from AutoCAD 2004, a seemingly relevant deficit we discovered, after hours of flailing, by calling technical support; Adobe should definitely make this clearer in its product info. You can produce flattened PDF files from AutoCAD 2004 using the older print-to-PDF technique, but you won't be able to create layered files until Adobe releases an update for AutoCAD 2004.
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 JPEG2000 produced higher quality despite being 30 percent smaller than standard JPEG compression. |
As the table shows, Acrobat 6 improves over the former version in both time and file efficiency. Xelerate performed reasonably with text files, but there were some artifacts in the high-resolution image.
Of course, file size isn't as important as quality when it comes to images. As you can see in Figure 5, Acrobat 6.0's JPEG2000 at maximum compression produced higher quality than JPEG despite being 30 percent smaller. At maximum quality, the images were virtually identical, despite a similar reduction in file size. Acrobat 6.0 is as fast as or faster than Acrobat 5.0, while producing much more compact files.
| Warranty lengths at a glance | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Beyond this period, you'll have to pay for phone or e-mail support, but don't despair: Adobe's support site includes comprehensive product support databases and very active user forums.
User opinions
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User Rating: 
2/10
Acrobat 6 is horrible software. Poor organization and execution of features. A big step down from 5.
Pros: None to speak of.
Cons: Good luck trying to find familiar tools. Text select tools are extremely tempermental, difficult to use in selecting and modifying attributes.
User Rating: 
8/10
Where oh Where is the File Menu?
Pros: Used to be a stable product..
Cons: For XP users, find an alternative. For those who regularly create PDF files by combining mutlitple PDF's you will be frustrated by the never available "file - Save as" option which Adobe rarely displays. Unfortunately, Acrobat is no longer a good softwa
User Rating: 
1/10
S L O W TO Print, and only occasionally works
Pros: makes PDF's (sometimes)
Cons: crashes regularly. Can't fully uninstall, and then can't reinstall. memory hog. slow. Continually get acrodist.exe errors. enough said.
User Rating: 2/10
Slower than slow
Pros: It e v e n t u a l l y delivers.
Cons: Acrobat 6.0 is dreadfully slow: 40 minutes each for ~ 10-page Word documents containing two simple flowcharts and four bitmap images on a 800MHz 512MB Win2K box.
User Rating: 
7/10
Worth it for Hard Core Documentation
Pros: If you've got a lot of documentation to do, Acrobat 6.0 Pro is worth the money. The interface is more user friendly than before and anyone with a modicum of computer knowledge can produce professional looking forms in no time.
Cons: Ah yes, the "bloat." I don't believe this is as much Adobe's fault as it is Microsoft's. They made their product to interface with XP, XP is a bloated OS so everyone has to buy faster processors to use it...it's a conspiracy. Also, something that has plag
User Rating: 
5/10
Extremely slow - stick with ver5
Pros: More application level integration. Nicer and easier UI
Cons: Very slow to load and when generating files - compared to v5. Stick with 5 for basic acrobat functionality and upgrade only if you must have the new features
User Rating: 2/10
Don't even bother if on OSX
Pros: It looks cool, that is about it
Cons: VERY UNSTABLE. I always print/output PostScript files and then run them through Distiller. Never had problems with this in earlier versions but now I consider myself very lucky if Distiller will even output a PDF. It ususally takes me between 5-10 time
User Rating: 8/10
Long Awaited Upgrade
Pros: The new interface is very appealing. The new engine makes conversion much more efficient and transparent. Consequently, creating PDFs has become a breeze (from either Excel, Word, or a WebPage). The reviewing features are also very sweet. Works very w
Cons: 1) The "Acrobat Assistant" still has to run in the System Tray if you are to use it flawlessly. 2) Acrobat Reader is an 8.7 MB download. It sure is a pain over a dial-up connection. The most popular format on the Internet requires almost 2hrs to downloa
User Rating: 1/10
Slow speed, Files too big
Pros: There are some good features such as support for AutoCAD, security improvements and the annotation tools.
Cons: Incredibly slow! Some ACAD drawings took over 20 mins to process and print (this is on a 2.4 Ghz machine with 1 GB of RAM). Also, when files were finished the files sizes were way too large to email. Adobe said I could now "optimize" the file (separate
