Software
Review
Acrobat 6
by
Kathleen McGuinness
The
first thing you notice in Acrobat 6 is the interface, very spiffy, very
OS X. And there are now two versions: Standard and Professional.
Professional allows you a lot more interaction between other Acrobat Pro
users. Good when you’re working with a team or software savvy clients.
And there are some nice things you can do with the new Acrobat.
• Turn scanned documents into a pdf with editable text
• Add an Acrobat plug-in to MS Word to make pdfs
• Combine multiple pdfs into one pdf
• Add footers, headers, backgrounds, and watermarks to your pdf
• Reduce pdf size automatically - this reduce image quality, too.
No miracles yet.
• Turn PowerPoint presentations into pdfs.
• For us Mac folk no converting web pages to pdfs, yet. This feature
is Windows only.
• Acrobat Professional: Process forms and add form fields
• Drag and drop feature, ala Stuffit. Create pdfs on the fly.
• Better preflighting capability for printing and color separation
preview
• Add email and comment review. This only works for other Acrobat
users, not via the free Reader.
• New tools: arrow tool, clouding tool, polygon and polyline tool
• Views are better and include a split window
• New zoom views including a dynamic zoom and a pan and zoom
• View layers in Acrobat Standard, but you can only manage them
in the Pro version
• Problem-checking detects trouble like missing files and fixes
the problem
• New security measures. You can add digital signatures
And while eBook capability doesn’t interest me, a college, software,
art teacher I know was pretty jazzed about this.
You also have more ability to link an swf to an image in Acrobat. But
when I tried to open the swf in the pdf it would not open the Flash file,
OS 9.2 using an Reader 5. Evidently a Reader 6 only feature or maybe this
only works with OS X.
Want to embed multimedia content like swfs, or mpgs? You’ll need
to have Acrobat 6 Pro.
But as I’ve already got a lot of Acrobat capabilities within InDesign
I’m unlikely to spend much time with Acrobat 6. But there are times,
like when a client recently sent me a pdf instead of image files.
Using Acrobat 6, I was able to copy the needed image from the pdf to clipboard
then paste it into Photoshop to retouch it.
So Acrobat 6 Standard is a good program to have. But if you work with
other Acrobat 6 users, features like email comments and review will
be a boon to your work flow efficiency. And then, you’ll definitely
want to get Acrobat 6 Professional.