30993

Provides: PDF creation, PDF commenting, form creation, Portfolio creation, secure document creation, etc.

Format: DVD

Developer: Adobe

Minimum Requirements: PowerPC or Intel, Mac OS X v10.4.11, DVD drive

Processor Compatibility: Universal

Retail Price: $449 new, $159 upgrade

Availability: Out now

Version Reviewed: 9.0

At first glance, there's not much difference between Acrobat 9 and its predecessor, Acrobat 8 (see the Applelinks review). The program maintains its DGI format, meaning each document carries all of Acrobat's controls—independently. I protested this actively after the last release, but I apparently was a voice in the wilderness, and all my angst was for naught. I must move on. Fortunately, Acrobat 9 Pro has a lot to offer. Look up at this review's credits and see what I list for what Acrobat 9 Pro provides; you'll see the abbreviation "etc." I don't think I've ever placed an "etc." in that region before. Alas, if we were to have PCs rather than Macs, there would have been even more to that "etc." More on that later.

For some time, I've become strikingly aware of how few people fully understand what the Acrobat program can do and why this is a special program. Part of the problem is that Acrobat's original function, the creation of PDFs can now be done by a number of programs. [In fact, under Adobe's direction, PDF is an ISO standard and is no longer under the control of Adobe.] In addition, there was the free reader program, also called Acrobat (Acrobat Reader). Several years ago, Adobe wised up and, starting with Acrobat 8, changed the name of the free program to "Adobe Reader." This name change resolved a problem where if someone asked another if they had the Acrobat program, a positive response often not really answered the question. Now, if you have "Adobe Reader," then you clearly do not have Acrobat.

In the dark days before Acrobat, it was very challenging to exchange documents. If you created a letter and sent it to someone else, it was not a big deal if the recipient did not have your fonts, but it might be a bigger deal if they didn't have your application. Nowadays, many applications have both Mac and PC formats, and the vast vast majority of them can read and write to the same document. However, if you created a very tightly spaced form, the chances that any recipient would receive that form in the same structure you sent was beyond unlikely. Recognizing this issue, Adobe was one of many software companies that worked on a universal document format that would bridge the chasm created by not only different applications, but platforms and fonts. In fact, then CEO John Warner's specific goal for Acrobat in 1992 (then named Camelot) was "Our vision for Camelot is to provide a collection of utilities, applications,and system software so that a corporation can effectively capture documents from any application, send electronic versions of these documents anywhere, and view and print these documents on any machine."

Probably the biggest, niftiest, and greatest feature in Acrobat 9 Pro is "Acrobat.com." In other words, something that is not directly part of Acrobat itself. That's not to say there isn't some great stuff there, but, like I said in the beginning, the range of what Acrobat does is an "etc." game. To access these new tools, you go to your File menu and select "Collaborate," as seen below. As you can see, there are a number of options.

The best part of all this is that Acrobat.com is part of what you get with Acrobat 9 Pro. You can collaborate and work with a variety of people online via your browser. Admittedly there is a bit of bureaucracy the very first time you set this up, as you need to create an Adobe identity. You will also need to install some software onto all of the participants' computers. This is a one-time event, and is a very minor issue. Once done, you are good to go. As far as others accessing your work, you may set up your documents as restricted or not-restricted. People you invite can enter as guests via their browser; they do not need Acrobat 9 Pro (some of the functions, such as collaboration with PDFs, mean they need to download the free Acrobat 8 or the new 9). You get up to 5MB of space to store your working documents and, if need be, Acrobat.com provides a word processor, Buzzword, for you to use on the site, which provides joint word processing capabilities for anyone invited to your location.

Probably the selection that will be the biggest hit is the "Share my Screen..." option that lets you share your screen or someone else's screen with up to two other people concurrently. [If two in addition to yourself is too few, Adobe will provide a paid service that let's you share with 1500 people.] Below is a screen shot of my wife's computer displaying an image I have opened in Preview on my computer. Anything on my computer screen will be displayed on her screen. And, with a simple, mutual change, I can then see items on her screen. [It is not possible to have a split screen where both are showing part of each.]

There is a bit of a delay for any action on your screen before it shows on anyone else's screen, and this may take some getting used to.

Now, back to Acrobat...

Probably the most important feature that's been added to Acrobat is the ability to play Flash media. Not just contain Flash media, Acrobat 8 could do that, but Acrobat 9 plays Flash media as a self contained entity. This is one of the more significant results of Adobe having purchased Macromedia. There is no doubt that Adobe wanted Flash, and it's comforting to note that Adobe is doing right with this purchase. But, this dynamic doesn't really stop with simply playing Flash media within a PDF; Adobe is now using Flash dynamics to help create dynamic structure for Adobe documents: enter Portfolio.

With Acrobat 8, Adobe introduced the dynamic of the Combining files. What this did was create a shell that could contain any type of file that can be "PDFed." The catch was that while this approach certainly did a great job of holding a bunch of separate documents together as a packet (technically, it is a special type of zip file that operates like a container), there was no way to "present" your documents. Now there is Portfolio. With Portfolio, you can set the order of the documents, and prepare both cover pages and headers for presenting your documents. Overall, Portfolio lets you put a professional package around your presentations.

The whole paradigm of Portfolios is one of creating a single item of other documents. The items can be brought in from any part of your computer; they can be your standard image types (JPEG, GIF, & TIFF) that will automatically be converted to PDF files on the fly as they are added into a Portfolio. PDF and Flash files can also be added directly. Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files can be brought in and the receiver can see the first page of the file, but they will require Word, Excel, and/or PowerPoint to view the rest of the document. If these files are converted into PDFs prior to placing them into a Portfolio, no other program is required to view the file. Keynote files are not compatible with PowerPoint at all.

The power of a Portfolio means that, in a single item, you can package a number of different program documents and/or application types, including multimedia. The receiver can print one section or the whole thing. You have control on the color of the container and any artwork contained therein. And, as long as any of the documents are PDFs, you know they will be able to see and work with the documents as long as they have either Acrobat 9 (any version) or the free Adobe Reader 9. They will have as much access to any of the documents as you've allowed (via permissions) or be restricted by their ability to open documents of application types they own.

Creating a Portfolio is as simple as selecting the option from the File menu (see the screenshot two images above) and tossing in the items you want to add or selecting them from an Open window. Image types that are not already PDFs will be converted on the fly as you drag them in. As mentioned, you can add other program files, but they will not be converted to PDFs, nor will Acrobat open them.

Once you've added all the files you wish to add, you can spend as little time on this or as much as you can afford. You have choices as to whether the items are in lists or in fancy presentations like Apple's Cover Flow (in OS X v10.5). You can add "welcome" pages and include headers and color schemes, set permissions for the whole thing or individual files, then you can publish this on the web, e-mail it, or send it off directly to Acrobat.com.

The interface for all this is, of course, Flash based.

Security is as strong as it's ever been; in addition to preventing access via a password you can prevent printing and even copying text out of a document without a password created by the user/creator of the document. (Click on the document below to see a full size image.)

Unfortunately I found no mechanism that allows you to redact words (a feature implemented in Acrobat 8 Pro) on a global basis in a Portfolio. Such actions must be performed on individual documents, and probably is best performed on documents before they are included in the Portfolio.

Although Acrobat could compare two versions of the same text document for some time, now it can compare drawings and scans. Other improvements include significantly better web page recognition. In the past, some web pages were drawn very poorly and did not appear in the completed PDF as they did on your browser. Unfortunately, sometimes text will appear somewhat heavy, so it's not perfect yet.

Form creation intelligence has also improved over Acrobat 8, but again, nothing has been done to provide dimensional control on the size of fields. Thus, if you make one field about 2.5 inches wide, there's no way to know how wide it is nor can one simply type dimensions into a field to obtain a specific size. You are still held to the limitation of "eyeballing it." On the other hand, one significant interface improvements is the ability to reorder any tab order by simply dragging the displayed fields up or down in the side panel.

Perhaps one of the slickest, most hidden features within Acrobat 9 Pro is part of the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) improvements in Acrobat. Here's the issue: if you create a PDF from a text document, all of the text is still text. That is, you can select the text, find the text, and, to a limited degree alter the text. However, if you scan a page of text, you can still convert that document into a PDF, but the text on that page is an image of text—and anyone who's scanned a full page knows how large such a full page of scanned anything can be as far as its storage space is concerned. Simply, a page of text is much, much smaller than a scanned document of a page of text. This has been a long standing problem with scanned pages of text. While there are a number of scanning software programs that provide OCR capabilities to convert a page of an image of text into a page of text, one of the issues they all claim to overcome (and none do a perfect job) is to maintain the structure and appearance of the original document after the OCR process.

For many years, Acrobat has had built-in OCR capabilities where the dynamic is that the product of the OCR process was an invisible skin over the document so that you never lost the look of the page while still maintaining the benefits of actual text to search and select. The problem though has always been that you still had the storage "weight" of a full scanned page.

New with Acrobat 9 Pro is a whole new option when converting a scanned page to a page of functioning text called "ClearScan." Remaining from Acrobat 8 are two other options of "Searchable Image" and "Searchable Image (Exact)." The difference between these two is that the former process downsamples the image to some degree, while the "Exact" option does not. Downsampling can potentially degrade the full quality of the image, and in any situation where interest in the original image is paramount, any downsampling could be a non-starter.

ClearScan replaced the text with a new Type 3 font that best matches the original text and leaves a low quality scan of what was originally there. You access ClearScan by clicking on the "Edit" button seen in the Recognize Text window and pressing down on the "PDF Output Style" dropdown menu as shown below. Like I said, this is hidden.

I was very curious about all this, so I scanned a page from a magazine and made a series of tests, which provided some very interesting results...

I scanned the page three different ways. First, I did a straight scan of the page and saved it as a TIF format. This was saved out as 19.6MB image file, fairly typical for a 24 bit full page 300 ppi image.

I then tested this TIF document by dragging it into Acrobat, which converted it directly into a PDF. In addition, I also scanned the document twice via Acrobat (if you have a TWAIN plugin on your computer, you should be able to scan directly into Acrobat). Within Acrobat, there is an option for saving the image either as "smaller size" or "higher quality." The default is in the middle of this slider (there is no number field as shown in the bottom third of the image below). I tried it both at the middle region and also at full "High Quality."

As shown in the chart below, the only version of the scan that gave the results I expected was the TIF to PDF conversion. Here, the size of the Exact version of the OCRed text was a tad larger than the straight scan, the Searchable Text version was a tad smaller than the original file, and the ClearScan version was significantly smaller than the original file.

	TIF to PDF	Scan - medium	Scan - HQ
Size of Document	540 kb	72 kb	408 kb
Searchable Text	520 kb	668 kb	676 kb
Searchable Text (Exact)	556 kb	84 kb	420 kb
ClearScan	176 kb	184 kb	204 kb

What was completely unexpected was the difference between the size of the document and the Searchable Text for the Medium scan level. These numbers so surprised me that I ran the test again and got (essentially) the same numbers. [The reason for "essentially the same numbers" is that since there is no way to place the size/quality slider exactly the same place, there was no way I could exactly duplicate the scan once I moved the slider.]

As far as the quality of the scan goes, the image below is very telling. In it is a close up of the same region. The image on the left (#1) is the TIF scan. Image #2 is the medium quality Acrobat scan, and image #3 is the Acrobat high-quality scan. What stands out is that Acrobat uses JPEG compression for decreasing the size of images, and the #2 image below clearly displays the onset of JPEG degradation, or the little loose pixels floating around the text. You can clearly see this around the blue text on the very top and toward the bottom ("The ide..."). Also noteworthy is that the Acrobat scanned images do not display any anti-aliasing; note how pixilated the "W" of Wolfgang appears.

 

The next issue regards the difference between the documents that have been processed with either Searchable Text option versus the ClearScan. Below shows the full reason why ClearScan gets its name. On the left is a close-up of the Acrobat "medium scan" that has been processed with the Searchable Text option (both Searchable Text and Searchable Text (Exact) appear exactly the same). On the right is the ClearScan of the same image. Notice the JPEG degradation around the characters on the left while the right side is degradation free.

Let me add that what you see may not be what you get. Note in the image above there is circonflexe above the "o" in Côte. Even after being processed via ClearScan, you can still see the punctuation accent, even though when you copy this text and paste it elsewhere, the circonflexe will not show up. Similarly, if there is super- or sub-scripted text, the height of the text will be ignored when pasting. Thus, the chemical formula for water would copy and paste as H20, and the "2" would not be sub-scripted in the pasted text, but would still appear correctly on the PDF.

It is disappointing that Acrobat does not provide the option to scan pages directly as a TIF image rather than Acrobat's default format, JPEG. The quality is substantially better. When you consider that the ClearScan processing was the smallest, this option is not unreasonable to ask for. Please note the quality of the individual characters in the image on the left above versus the quality of the characters in image #1 in the 2nd image above. The quality of the text after processing the TIF image into a PDF retained the quality of the TIF image.

Probably the biggest gap as far as UI (user interface) is concerned in Acrobat 9 is that there is still no way to save any Workspace. There are around 100 possible tool icons that can be placed on a document's Toolbar, that means there is around 100! (one hundred factorial) possible combinations of how to present them. [Factorial is a mathematical tool that multiples that number times all of that number's lesser numbers, or 100 x 99 x 98 x 97 x 96 x (etc.) to provide all possible combinations, and, in this case, that's a very, very, very large number.] That means that when an office IT person comes up to a computer to assist the user, they are very likely going to find nothing the way they need it for the specific assistance they are about to provide. In addition, there's no way an office can supply custom-made workspaces to their employees.

And this brings me around to another question: when will Acrobat join Adobe? Back in 2004, Adobe created the Creative Suite (CS) dynamic. This was a major change for Adobe, as it meant that rather than produce their products individually, an entire suite of products were to be released all at the same time. Besides the unified shipping date, another major objective was to create a unified appearance to all of the products. Over the past four years, Adobe has done an excellent job of not only supplying their products all in one fell swoop, but perhaps most importantly, to unify the dynamics, look and feel, and interaction of their products, and then there's Acrobat...

Interactively, Acrobat is very much part of the Suite, but that's about it.

Consider that despite the fact that Acrobat and PDF creation is fully embedded within the Suite programs, it is neither released with the rest of the Suite nor is there any attempt to have Acrobat follow the look and feel of the rest of the Suite. Yes, it's very easy to argue that because the main user base of Acrobat is business, not the creative community that purchases the Suite collections, there is no reason for Acrobat to change what their customers are used to seeing. On the other hand, I see no reason to not change.

On the bright side, there is one advantage to having Acrobat being released before the Suite: knowing that Acrobat Pro 9 has been released, it also means that CS4 can't be too far behind. When? No one outside of some very high people at Adobe know, and they are not telling. However, if the past is any profit of the future, CS4 is likely to be sooner than later.

Meanwhile, back to Acrobat 9 Pro. Despite the lack of a few features (just mentioned) this is a very strong release. With Acrobat's new ability to play Flash media, the Portfolio creation, and enhancements to OCR, compare documents, and form creation are some of the standout features of Acrobat 9.

Unfortunately, the Mac version still lags behind what the PC users receive: the ability to PDF directly out of any Microsoft product, to PDF from e-mail, or to create XML forms via LiveCycle Designer ES. This is in addition to the fact that Acrobat 9 Standard and Acrobat 9 Pro Extended do not even exist for the Mac. [If you talk to Adobe folks, they will tell you that since there are no Macs in major businesses, there is no need for those last two programs. But, since those two programs are not available for the Mac, the Mac's chance to get into businesses that depend on those two programs doesn't exist. A classic chicken and egg situation.]

This is a strong release of Acrobat, but, ironically, probably the biggest reason to upgrade is the Acrobat.com website, not just the Acrobat program. Suite users can either update their Suite collection now or play the waiting game for CS4.

Applelinks Rating

Buy Acrobat 9

___________ Gary Coyne has been a scientific glassblower for over 30 years. He's been using Macs since 1985 (his first was a fat Mac) and has been writing reviews of Mac software and hardware since 1995.

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