10750

Provides: PDF creation, providing for commenting, form creation, Portfolio creation, secure document creation, PDFs to Word and Excel conversion, etc.
Format: DVD
Developer: Adobe
Requirements: Mac OS X.5.8 + or X.6.4 +, Intel Mac, 1.2 Gigs of HD space, DVD Drive, Safari 4 or 5.
Processor Compatibility: Universal
Retail Price: New - $449; upgrade - $199
Availability: Out now, and will soon be available for the Creative Suites.
Version Reviewed: X.0

Change can be a great thing, but, as they say, with great change comes great responsibility. This new release of Acrobat, Acrobat X (say "10," not "ex"), is the biggest rewrite of the interface ever. Any time there is a new release of software, typically the primary focus that beckons new or return buyers are new and/or better features. There are, of course, new and/or better features in Acrobat X, but the biggest change from previous versions of this release is the interface. In many cases, having the various tools and processes located in this new interface makes the features easier to find and use. Laying all the tools right out in front of you in the tabbed interface makes discovery easier. However, finding what you want can be much more of a challenge. Additionally, some of those changes were done halfway, were poorly thought out, and, in some cases, are just plain nonsensical. Please understand that there is much to like with AX, but getting to what you like will take some work on your part.

This will be a rather long review, much longer than my editor would like but I do have a reason for this. Normally when I do a review, the general interface is not an issue. Or, if it is, only one small part of the review is likely to mention and elaborate on the interface. In the case of Acrobat X, the interface is a major issue. However, the interface is only part of an application. For example, one of the improved features in Acrobat X is it's ability to turn a PDF into a Word document. Judging the quality of how well it does that task is separate from any changes in how to do that task. Because one needs to interact with an application to achieve any result, I shall first deal with the new UI (user interface) and then discuss the new and/or enhanced and/or changed features.

Acrobat X: the New User Interface

There's no doubt that the previous UI of Acrobat was confusing, bewildering, and for many people seemed to intentionally hide too many of the features from users. Acrobat, which started as an application simply to create documents that were "digitally printed" has grown into an amazing powerful tool that can do document management, OCR, document conversion, comparisons, work with 3D drawings from AutoCAD, printing preflight, redaction, and an amazing host of other features was a victim of its own abilities. As the program grew, the engineers adding controls here, features there, all wherever it seemed to make sense at the time. Because of this, finding what you needed often took some digging, hunting, and hacking. Often, the location of a feature made no sense whatsoever. For example, you could create a PDF of a web page from either "File (menu) -> Create PDF -> From Web Page" or from "Advanced (menu) -> Web Capture -> Create PDF from/Web Capture." While I am a great fan of redundancy, redundancy where a different name was used to get to the same place was just plain strange.

The people who will be most effected by AX are the long-time users. That is, long-time users are likely to assume that they can get the new release, install, and expect to get right to work with all the new features. Ironically, experienced users will not be able to do this. Experienced users will need to study, hack, hunt, and study some more to do things they've been doing for some time. Get ready to buy extra books, find web tutorials, check out Lynda.com, TotalTraining.com and hosts of other sources to find out how to use a program that you may have used since version 1. Lots of fun.

Something did need to be done. When opportunities like this come up, there is great potential to do wonderful things. Alas, this didn't work out as one might have hoped. This new release of Acrobat takes most of the entire design and user interface and casts them aside. There was a glimmer of hope that Acrobat might be joining the rest of Adobe when I saw the new Acrobat icon as it was the same design as all of the other Adobe Applications (look to the right where the Acrobat 9 icon is on top and the Acrobat X icon is on the bottom). Acrobat still used the swirly A rather than using an elemental "Ac" or something, but now the icon uses the CS5 book motif. Meanwhile, very little of the old UI remains. While that in itself is not necessarily a bad thing, there was great potential to add some of the features that users have been begged for for years: tabbed documents, not there. Workspaces, not there. And things you may have used for years such as Organizer, gone, menus you've used for years, gone. If that were not enough, names have changed: "Typewriter" is now, "Add or Edit Text Box." It goes on.

If there were nothing more frustrating than what I've already mentioned, suffice it to say that while learning AX, on one day I'd find something I was looking for one day and the very next day I couldn't find the exact same thing again without aggressive hunting.

But let me begin:

Instillation is excellent. Acrobat has begun to use the same installers that the CS team uses and it's nice. Curiously, the uninstaller that everyone else at Adobe places in your Utilities folder (-> Adobe Installers) is right where it's always been with Acrobat: in the Acrobat folder (in the Application folder). I only mention that because it's always been essential with Acrobat to uninstall the program and NOT simply dump it into the trash. [The same goes for all Adobe applications now: NEVER simply toss an Adobe application in the trash. It's essential that you activity uninstall Adobe applications and/or suites.] Although, if you happen to work in a situation where you might need to get the job done in a hurry after receiving Acrobat X, you might want to keep your older version of Acrobat to fall back on in an emergency. However, if you do keep the old version. After installing Acrobat X, the next time you run Acrobat 9 you will be prompted to reinstall some features for Acrobat 9. DO NOT DO THIS AS IT WILL BREAK SOME OF THE INSTILLATION FEATURES FOR ACROBAT X!

Acrobat X will start at a good clip and subsequent restarts of Acrobat X will be very quick. Seriously, very very quick. The Acrobat team has done an outstanding job with the startup time. One of the first things you will notice with AX is the shortened menus as seen below. On the top you can see the menus for Acrobat 9, below them are the menus for Acrobat X. Some of the items you used to be able to find in the menus are still there, but the vast majority are now to be found on the right hand side of each document and your challenge is to find what you are looking for. More on the right-hand Panels on the side of documents a bit later.

Do note that if you have any plug-ins or scripts that rely upon a particular item to be in a particular place in a menu, the plugin or script will have to be rewritten to point the script to the new location where that feature exists now (assuming that it hasn't been removed). If you've used key-commands to access those features, but are not always remembering what key-command does what so you casually look in the menu to remind you, good luck. With the removal of the menus, the ability to look up the key-command is mostly gone. The good news is that just about all key-commands still work even if the menu option is gone.

The other feature you will see at the very beginning is the Welcome or Access Screen seen below. About the only good thing I can point to with the Access Screen is that it's a fine place to access your last five previously seen PDFs. It's also a fine place to start creating a Portfolio (more on them later), Combine files into a PDF, and probably not always the best place to start to create a PDF Form. But sadly, if you want to create a PDF, it's probably the least likely place you want to start. [You can close this window by clicking on the Red dot in the upper left but if you want the window back you need to quit and restart. This is different from all of the other Adobe apps where you can reopen the closed Welcome screen by going to (typically) the Help menu and selecting the Welcome window. The good (or bad) news is that every time you open Acrobat X, the Welcome screen will welcome you.]

I mentioned just a moment ago that the "Create PDF in the Welcome screen is useless. It is. When clicked, the Finder window opens so you can select some document to convert into a PDF. That's it, nothing more. However, if you go to the File menu and mouse down to the Create selection, you can see the great breath of options available to you. And finally I'm going to be able to talk about some of the great things that are in Acrobat X:

PDF from File... lets you take any document type that can be converted directly into a PDF and do so. These typically are graphic images such as a JPEG or a TIF image.

The next three options, creating a PDF from a screen capture, window capture or selection capture are pretty much what they sound like they are. Select the menu item and then create the capture. It works very well with the only limitation is that as opposed to a standard screen capture application like Snapz Pro, you cannot capture something in progress such as mousing down on a menu. There is one very curious dynamic to this: when you open the PDF screen capture in Acrobat, it will be about 25% larger in size than it originally was (when viewed at 100%). Fortunately, if you open that PDF in Photoshop, it will appear as normal size. I do not have a clue as to why Acrobat increases the size of their screenshot image.

The next option is to create a PDF from a web page. Actually there are three ways to do this in and/or using Acrobat. When this menu selection is selected, you get the standard "Create PDF from Web Page" option that's been around for years as shown below (including the "Settings" options shown in the 2nd image below). The benefits of this approach is that you maintain all of the links, Flash videos, and other attributes of the page. In addition, if you are following a series of links on the page, you can mouse down on a link in the PDF and you can "Append" onto the already generated PDF. The negative is that it takes a very very very long time to generate each page using this approach.

Alternatively, if you use FireFox, there is now a new option in the stacks of plugin options: Convert (see screenshot below). This provides the same options as the previous Web Page conversion but does it remarkably fast. Unfortunately the Convert tool uses some valuable vertical space. Fortunately you can remove it by selecting View (menu) -> Toolbars -> Adobe Acrobat - Create PDF. Sadly there is no key command for this and there's no apparent way for this to not use up the entire row of space. [Note: this feature is not available in Safari.]

The catch with all of this is that if you do generate any pages with links or more critically any links to the original website, any time you scroll past (for example) a Flash video that needs access to it's source data, you will get an interruption that you must deal with it and the options are dreadful. Consider, you've created a PDF from website blahblah.com. On that page are links to things you really don't care about but the links do exist. In Adobe's desire to help protect you (a worthy goal), the following warning pops up. The only option is to not connect to this site EVER AGAIN or block access this moment in time. Well, that seems OK but...

whenever you scroll past the item that is trying to make contact with the website again, you get the following window popping up again and again and again. I had one document I was trying to find some information from and I got so annoyed not being able to do anything without getting interrupted by these messages that I chose to delete the document rather than to keep on dealing with the constant repeated warnings.

If you chose "Allow," than you will have to wait for the information to download to your computer which is fine if you want to see it but if they are adds, you get to have the annoying adds drive you crazy from a PDF. Unfortunately, there's no way to know which links that this PDF is trying to access are adds or content.

Unfortunately a simple option such as "Do not allow this document to access this (or any) website unless the user initiates the action." is not provided. Neither is an option of "Click on any item with a link to access the link."

The third option is to create a lifeless PDF. By that I mean that any links on the page are killed, any interaction is removed, but it does remain a full standard PDF. To do this, go to Print the document, but don't press the OK button just yet.

In versions of Acrobat prior to 9, one could select a PDF driver to print to PDF. However since Acrobat 9, that option was removed for technical reasons (by Apple) and now there's a new option under the PDF button on the Print dialog. If you select the "Save as PDF..." option, you are using Apple's PDF driver to generate the PDF. If you scroll down a bit further, you can access Adobe's PDF list of PDF generator options and have full use of all of the internal dynamics that Acrobat provides. Explore this, it will be worth your while.

Let me point out one of the new features that I do love. In the Create PDF menu, a new option of "PDF from Clipboard." Yup, whatever you have on your clipboard, image, text, images and text, whatever. Once you have something on your clipboard, go to that menu item, select it, and poom, you have a page with the items in your clipboard on the page(s) of a PDF. Of the new features in Acrobat X, this is probably one of my favorite because it's simple, elegant, functional, and has saved me gobs of time.

Before I leave the Menu system, let me point out my biggest complaint with the new menus: the "Save as..." option. Normally, when one wishes to save the current open document with a new name, one chooses the Save as... option, renames the document, and move on. However, if you wished to change the document into a format that is not usable by the current application (any application), you'd "Export" the document. So, for example, if you were using Illustrator, a vector based application, and saved a document as a JPEG image, a bit-mapped format, you'd export the document.

Fortunately or unfortunately, Acrobat followed Microsoft's lead on this and does the same thing that Word does: you use the "Save as..." option to generate any kind of document. In the grand scheme of things, that's not really all that bad or evil. After all, the differences between Save as and Export are more an issue of semantics than anything else.

Specifically, what makes this annoying is that when you select "Save as..." to rename a PDF from the menu, you first drag down to Save as AND THEN you also have to drag out to the right side tree to actually do the "Save as..." At least Microsoft did it right in that you could select from a dropdown menu in the Save as window which format you wanted to Save as. Ironically, you can also do that with AX. Every option you have from the menu you also have from the dropdown list in the "Save as..". window.

So, if you are working on a PDF and wish to have a variety of versions of the same document, you need to drag down and then slide right. This may seem like a small thing but because this is different than ANY OTHER APPLICATION I'VE EVER SEEN, it requires a different memory-movement action and thereby, after 25 years sitting in front of a Mac, I screw up just about every time. There are a variety of things I do not like about the new UI, but I have to list this one as the most annoying change in the entire application. Not bad, just annoying, and when something annoying happens over and over, it's bad.

The Page Dynamics

At this point let me show you a page in Acrobat X as shown below. On the left you see the Page Thumbnails, Bookmarks, Attachments, and Signatures as from before. There have been essentially no changes here. In the middle you see a bunch of icons across the top and on the right you see Three unopened Panels for Tools, Comments, and Share.

You can have both the left and right side panels open at the same time and depending on your screen real estate, that's something you chose to do or not. Both left and right panels can be closed as well. Part of Adobe's logic (which is mostly correct) is that most screens nowadays (especially Apple's) are wider than older screens providing more width to take advantage of. Thus, for anything that could potentially decrease the size of the reading region is shifted to the width to provide for more vertical height for the document. Below you can see each of the three panels. [I'll be discussing the Comments and Share fields later.]

The Tools panel has some interesting issues. First off, please note that in the Tools panel shown above on the left I have 12 different tabs to select from. When you first open Acrobat X, you will only see 7 (see below). The other five are hidden and cannot be seen unless you click on the little side-menu box on the top of the Panel as shown below and actively manually select each item you you may want displayed one at-a-time. (Personally I find it very amusing that "Accessibility" is hidden by default.)

One option that's there that I do find very handy is on the very top where you can select if you want "Allow Multiple Panels Open." If this is selected you can have the "Sign & Certify" open at the same time as the "Pages" Tab. The big issue why you may not want that selected is if you want two things open that are on opposite ends of this list of tabs. Scrolling back and forth is not as fun as clicking open and closed. With that option not selected, if you click on a different tab, the new tab opens and the previous one closes.

And to answer your question, the order of these tabs cannot be change and the location of these tabs (on the right side) cannot be shifted over the left side. Customization? Fahgetaboutit! You can display an option or you can hide an option.

[Now that I've explained the Panels dynamic, let me point out one of the "Create PDF" features removed from Acrobat 9: "Create PDF from Blank Page." Although gone from the Create menu, there are three (or four) ways to still do this now: (1) One is to copy a space from a page and then Create a PDF from Clipboard. (2) If you happen to have some text on your clipboard, you can always delete the text. (3) If you know the key-command, there's Shift-Command-q, or (4) if you already have a page open, and therefore have access to the Tools Panel, you can go to Tools -> Pages -> More Insert Options -> Insert Blank Page and then delete the original page.]

The one are that you can customize is the top middle section where all the icons are presented. Within the strict guidelines that Adobe has created, you can do all you want.

The issue is that you can change things, but from where? Below is a screenshot showing the top icons and are identified where you can change them from.

So, for example, just to the right of the "Create" button (dropdown), there are four icons for Open, Save, Print, and Share. I'm likely to never want to use those icons, so to remove them I right-click (Control-click) and see the following options. I have to know that I can find those icons in the File menu option and then I have to select each item at a time to deselect that item. Note that although I've already removed the Open... and Save icons (see below), the remaining two do not have any check mark or any other marker next to them indicating that those icons are still on the screen. This lack of feedback is sadly existent all over this area.

As the above image states, the Create (dropdown menu) cannot be removed. I find that button very ironic because you HAVE to have a PDF open to have access to a button to create a PDF. As the comedian says, you can't make these things up...

One of the other aspects gone from Acrobat 9 is when you clicked within a given region on the top of a PDF page, for example to click on the area above where the Open... Save, etc. items are located, you'd automatically be displayed those specific tool items. Now, you can only look at the full range of drop-menu options and you have to hunt and dig to see which of the selections has what you want. The lack of feedback as to what's already on the screen (or not) only adds to the cumbersome and often confusing aspect of this UI.

Now, if you're sharp-eyed, you may have noticed that one of the options above is "Page Display," and this title can also be seen in the View menu as shown below. (Below are two screenshots: on the top you see the menu access to Page Display and on the bottom is a right-click access to page display.) Simply, if you go to the menu system, you can do any of those commands, and if you go to the right-click option you can add icons to do those things to the icon bar. Ironically, from the menu there IS feedback as to what's selected. There is a big difference in accessing these commands from the menu as opposed to a right-click. When accessing them from a right-click, you are adding or removing the icons. When accessing them from the menu you are accessing the command, not the icon. Thus, if you go to the menu and select Page Display -> Single Page View, the PDF you currently had open would shift from the Scrolling view to Single Page view.

However, if you do want to change the icons from the menu (as opposed to a right-click), it can be done: if you look below, there's one other menu option "Show/Hide." If you scroll down to there you can drag through four menu tiers to either show or hide icons in this top region.

[One warning: the last item in the 2nd tier of Show/Hide is "menu Bar." if you select that, all the menus will go away. There are two ways to return Acrobat X's menus: either press Command-Shift-m or Quit (Command-q) and restart Acrobat X. Escape doesn't do it.

You've been warned.]

The last section up there are the items that can be displayed or hidden via the Gear icon. After you click this (or select it from the right-click menu), a new window pops up that is somewhat reminiscent of the Font/DA Mover (and if you know what I'm talking about, two points!).

On the left-hand side is a list of every tab in the Tools Panel and every tool in each tab. If you open each tab (by tipping the triangle), you can see an icon for every action provided within that tool's tab. You can either double-click each tool to move it to the right side or you can click the right-facing arrow in the middle of the window. Also in the middle of the window is a vertical line that you can move over to create line breaks in the icon region. Any item that is already on the right side is grayed out on the left side-- excellent feedback.

Once the items are on the right side you can reorder them as you wish, there are two ways to do this: you can select the item by clicking on it and then you can click the up and down arrows on the far right side of the window. Alternatively you can drag them up and down which is just as you'd expect. But instead of using the computer-generic "grabbing hand" icon to drag the items around, when you first mouse-down on the icon, you are presented with a pixilated "negate" symbol as shown below. As you drag up (mind you, there's no feedback that you can do this), you will continue to get the negate symbol as you pass over each subsequent icon. But, as you are in between each icon, you can see a slim horizontal line indicating that you can let go of the mouse button. Once you do, your moved icon will be found just where you want it. So, here's a case were AX works just as you'd expect and want it to work, but the interactive feedback is telling you to stop right now. Strangely sad.

One last comment on the icons: did Adobe get any feedback on these. Below is a small collection of icons and below that are what they represent. See if you can figure out which of these six icons represents which of the features it initiates.

The six commands below are NOT in the order they are above. See if you can guess which command is supposed to go with which icon.

1. Insert Page
2. Export all Images
3. Rotate Pages
4. Distribute PDF Form and collect responses
5. Extract Page
6. More Insert Options

Answer is on the bottom of this review.

The best person to use the customizing tools provided within Acrobat X is the person who does the same thing day after day. If you are someone who on one day are making forms, the next day you are doing OCR work, and the next day you are doing pre-print work, you will either have more icons than can fit in that icon bin (they do not scroll, rather they only continue to go off to the right until they fall out of the screen and you can only access them from a down-facing arrow). What can I say, workspaces would completely take care of this.

However, Adobe's position is that since there are these Panels off on the right that provide bulk access to each of the possible chores one might be doing in Acrobat, there's no reason to have workspaces.

The Read mode

A new feature has been added to Acrobat X and that's the read mode. On the right-hand upper corner in the image below you see two opposing facing arrows. When I first looked at that I assumed it was going to drop me into full screen mode. Instead, what it does is to hide all of the tools and features one normally uses to manoeuver within a PDF.

What it does offer instead is a floating toolbar on the bottom third of the page as shown in the bottom image below.

In theory, this is a really nice idea. The problem is readily apparent when you realize that the new floating toolbar is covering text. "Oh" you might be thinking, "just move the curser off the page and the toolbar will go away." Well you are correct, sort of. The sad fact is that it goes away at some indeterminate amount of time AFTER you've moved off the page.

Both in Quicktime and in Flash, when watching a video, when you move the cursor over the movie, the control strip appears and when you move your cursor off the movie, the control strip immediately disappears. Not here. It goes away when "it" wants to. There are times when it goes away relatively quickly, other times it seems to take way too long. Sadly, when you want to read the text under the toolbar, it takes a lot longer than you want. As such I find this whole read mode a useless feature.

And sadly, this is the new feature you will find in Safari for reading PDFs on the web. The only difference is that in Safari, this is the only option you have.

The new and/or improved features
in Acrobat X

Protection

Probably the biggest feature in Acrobat is Sandboxing. This is a dynamic where you can open a PDF document and it's "sandboxed" from the rest of your system and is supposedly the best possible protection from an evil PDF. The catch? Well there's two. First off, Sandboxing can only be done from Adobe Reader, not Acrobat (so when a PDF comes in you need to first open it in Reader to verify it's safe or not AND THEN open it in Acrobat if you need to do some things to/with the document. The other issue is that this dynamic is ONLY available for Windows. Macs need not apply.

The good news is that there is protection for Mac users. The primary protection is based on ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization) which is part of Window and OS X.6. This is sort of like the random number generators for garage door openers so that you really can't drive down the street clicking your garage button waiting for some other garage to randomly open up. Use of this capability was in Acrobat 9 as well.

Also from Acrobat 9 was Cross-domain configuration that dealt with "trust and risk" with default settings. This provided access at the server level and was either enabled or disabled as needed.

For corporate users, Acrobat X now allows the Apple Package Installer to provide easy access for global updates on protection. Also new is a password-based crypto key generation and a "strength meter" to verify the quality of the password.

Redaction has been improved a few ways, some minor (your redaction marks can now have different colors), some more functional. The Panels In AX make the redaction process easier to access and control.

One tool that needs a bit of comment is a new one called Sanitize Document. Below is the warning window you get when you first use this and it's one of the very very few screens that you should NEVER click the "Do not show this message again." You should ALWAYS review that screen before you run this feature.

Sanitize Document strips just about everything from a PDF but the content and if you've run redaction as well, there might not be much left of that either. The good news is that anything you run this on, you will be working on a copy. That's a good thing.

Portfolios

Portfolios were introduced in Acrobat 9 and are excellent way to place an enclosure around a collection of documents. In effect, what you are doing is attaching a variety of different things to a PDF with a fancy cover.

It's always been easy to combine multiple PDFs into a single file and if you are sending a group of PDFs to someone that's probably the best way to do it. However, what if you need to send some PDFs, a swf file, a web page or two, some Word and Excel files along with a Keynote file and some sound files. Yes you can dump all of those things into a folder and email it to someone, but what they will get after unzipping the file is a folder with a bunch of lose items and perhaps an instruction sheet telling them what the various items are and in what order you should be looking at them.

With this release of Acrobat, Adobe is advertising that the differences with Portfolios between Acrobat 9 and Acrobat X is "sophistication." I'll pass on whether AX meets the sophistication level, my wife still is not always happy with my clothing choices when we go out. However, there are a variety of enhancements such as the ability to play media within the Portfolio, as well as the ability to look at most documents, even if the format is not native to Acrobat. This latter ability actually comes from the Mac OS. Most documents nowadays self-generate an image of what's in the document. This is what you see when you single-click on a file in the Finder and then tap the Space bar: an image of that document, whether it's a Word, image, or media file of some kind will pop up on the screen. Portfolios use this same image to help the viewer to see what's in the file.

Like Acro-9, you can vary the colors and backgrounds of a Portfolio theme but now there is also various levels of transparency and a few other enhancements to give the final package a fancier look (this is the "sophistication"). Because Acro-9 uses Flex 3 and AX uses Flex 4 to do the structure, when you open an AX Portfolio in Acro-9 you are warned that not all features will work but you still can access all of the attached files. In fact, since these are actually "attached" documents, you can access anything that's attached all the way back to Acrobat 5, but you certainly will not get all of the special presentation benefits that you can in either Acro-9 or AX.

Unfortunately this sophistication does come at a cost, storage size. I took four items, a PDF, a movie, a .psd document and Word document with a combined storage size of 2.1 MB. As a curiosity I zipped the folder containing these items and it was 1.7 MB. After creating a Portfolio in Acrobat 9, the final size was 2.5 MB and the same material in a default Acrobat X Portfolio was 3.6 MB. Out of curiosity I zipped these two Portfolios and they remained the exact same size. In other words, for the new "sophistication," Portfolios have a bigger footprint than before.

Simply, you do not create portfolios to reduce or limit size. Despite the portfolios name, this is not necessarily the kind of thing that an artist might chose to display their work (but it certainly could be done). Rather, the Portfolio shines as a briefcase where one collects a wide variety of document types, and you wish to distribute these items to other parties in an organized manner. If your facility has any Flash developers, you can have them develop custom covers for a unique look and appearance. Since these are Flash based, they do not do so well on an iPad or iPhone but they can be placed on servers for the same experience and can be viewed in any browser capable of Flash.

Like Acro-9, you can only print PDF files from a Portfolio (you cannot, for example, print a Word document from a Portfolio) and as before, you can print selected PDFs or all PDFs. A big plus is that you can open an Acrobat 9 Portfolio in AX, make changes, save it and send it back to Acrobat 9 with no problems. I do compliment the Acrobat crew on that round-tripping feature with that backwards compatibility.

In addition to a variety of documents, you can also place web pages within a Portfolio. These show up as blank pages but when clicked on (and the person doing the clicking OKs accessing the web) the web page will show up inside the Portfolio. Lastly, you can play media from within the Portfolio as opposed to having to play the media (sound or video) outside of the Portfolio (such as having to open up iTunes to play a .m4v file).

Text Recognition (OCR) (Optical Character Recognition)

So, someone scanned a page and and sent it to you as a PDF. Now you have this page but it's a PDF of an image of a page with no selectable text. Sound familiar? Whether you are starting out from scanning a page yourself or obtaining a PDF from someone else, Acrobat Pro can OCR that page so that you can access the text on that page. Adobe is advertizing smaller documents than past versions but one also has to ask is the OCR any more accurate than past versions?

One big hole with Acrobat 9 was that after one did an OCR on a document, if one then tried to "Find All OCR Suspects," nothing would happen because that part of the application was not hooked up. It just didn't do anything. Now it does. But unfortunately, that's one of the few things that sort of works better with AX.

For testing I took a magazine with three columns of text and an image, set it up in my scanner (Epson V700), and did a variety of tests. I never moved the magazine nor changed any of the scan settings. When you scan from Acrobat, you have a choice between small size or high quality. If you want to get as good of results as you can, I do suggest you always select high quality, it does make a difference and the difference in final size is not worth the low quality scan.

There are two different settings in Acrobat X, three in Acrobat 9, so I only used the two common in both: "ClearScan" and "Searchable Image." ClearScan creates a Type 3 font that very closely matches the original font and preservers the background as a low-res copy. Searchable Image places an invisible layer of text over the original page. The former provides smaller documents while the later provides more accurate reproduction of the original page.

After I performed the scan and OCR operations (it's all done as a one-step process), I copied one full column of the results, pasted them into Word and counted real errors (as opposed to names it tagged as misspelled words). I also noted any differences in the final result.

Acrobat 9 - ClearScan: Document storage size 127 KB. There were zero errors but when pasted into Word, all formatting was lost. All paragraphs and the bullated text came in as one paragraph.

Acrobat 9 - Searchable Image: Document storage size 233 KB. There were 10 errors but the formatting was maintained perfectly.

Acrobat X - ClearScan: Document storage size 127 KB. There were only 3 errors but there were carriage returns at the end of every line.

Acrobat X - Searchable Image: Document storage size was 193 KB. This had 24 errors and like the ClearScan had carriage returns at the end of every line.

Acrobat X does provide the opportunity to Find all [OCR] suspects and/or Find First Suspect. If you do the Find First (and subsequent errors), you can correct the error, but the process is painfully slow, and very erratic. Occasionally you lose the Correction window and when you bring it up again, you have to start your corrections from the beginning, or not. I was never able to figure out why it would accept some of my changes and not others. Probably the biggest liability is that there is no "change all" option. In my sample text I had a number of bullated paragraphs. Acrobat X wasn't sure about those bullets and it stopped at each one asking if I thought it was a bullet or not. The whole correction process is very slow and plodding and to go through each of those bullets one-by-one (several times because sometimes the correction window would go away) was very painful.

Lastly, I did try to tag the scanned text from AX and the results were very inconsistent. The first time I did it I had an underscore "_" between every letter and character. Another time I did this the first paragraph had a carriage return after every line but starting from the 2nd paragraph the result had perfect formatting. Admittedly I did this test on a Friday, I'm not sure what would have happened if I did it on a Wednesday.

In Acrobat's defence, I've been using a variety OCR programs for over 20 years. None of them provide perfect results all the time and the final result is always dependant upon the quality of the original. The text in this document was around 9 or 10 points (and a serif font). The smaller the original font, the more issues you are likely to have and the "feet" of serif fonts tends to cause letters to merge together creating more errors. Nonetheless, the amount of variation under these conditions was very disappointing.

One last comment/warning. When you scan a document, there is an option to either append the new scan to the current document or to create a new document. This option is not sticky so that if you happen to have any PDF open at the time of the scan and fail to re-check the "new document" radio button, it will append to the already opened PDF. Fortunately it's very easy to "Extract" from the other PDF and you can also "remove" it at the same time from a checkbox in the Extract window. It would be very nice if this was a sticky option.

Forms

Probably the biggest issue that still confronts Mac owners is that Acrobat Pro for Mac leaves out LiveCycle Designer. Adobe's excuse/reason is that there are not enough Mac users who'd use LCD to make it worth their while to engineer that application for the Mac. I'm certainly not in a position to know one way or the other, but I am in a position to know that Mac users pay just as much as Window's users for an application that doesn't come with all it's parts. It has long been suggested that the Mac DVD for Acrobat Pro also come with a Windows version so that if they need (or want) to use LCD, they can. Many Mac users also have either VMware, Parallels, or Apple's Bootcamp so they can (and do) use Windows. If the Mac user chooses not to use the Window's version, that's their choice, but right now they are paying the same as Windows users for less software.

Otherwise, creating forms is one of the few areas where the new UI does work wonderfully. The need for having Workspaces are of limited need or value when creating and/or editing forms.

After you click on the start of the Form creation process (on the Forms tab in the Tools Pane, the whole interface view changes so that everything you need to create forms is there ready to use. This also means that all of the icon tools that populated your upper region are now replaced with tools specifically used for Form creation and editing. Well, mostly. If you look at the screenshot below, you can see to the right of the Create dropdown button in the upper left an icon for Opening, Saving and Printing. Although I have removed these icons in my general use window, they've come back just like the evil killer you thought you killed in the previous scene. They, and the Create PDF dropdown do not have much use or value when creating forms, but they sit there during the form creation process (and there's no way to remove them from the Form-creation layout).

Like Acrobat 9, creation of a Form is wonderfully simple, and Acrobat's form recognition engine is mostly excellent but does occasionally need some fine tuning after form creation. The ready access to all the tools in Acrobat X makes the form editing process much easier than Acrobat 9.

Once the form is created, it's extremely easy to distribute, respond, and/or collect the form via Acrobat.com as shown below. [Note: Acrobat.com is a free and paid service by Adobe (e.g., you can pay for more options).] Note also in the image that you can also Track the form (to see if everyone who's supposed to have has completed the form or not. In the option called "More Form Options," Adobe has made it extremely easy to generate the data from a form into spreadsheets or even text. This makes it very easy to export the data into something like a FileMaker database.

My only (long standing) complaint about the Form generator is that there is no mechanism to enter or alter the size of fields. There is no way to enter the width or height of fields or their location on the page. All one has to go on when creating or re sizing fields is to "eye-ball" them with your mouse. Since Acrobat has the properties window, it should an easy and logical location to place this feature if it ever occurs.

Commenting

For many versions of Acrobat, Comments have always been placed on the bottom of the page, now they've moved over to the right side Panels. This has the obvious advantage if you have a wide screen. However, as comments become more and more numerous, than maybe not so much. Fortunately there are a variety of options to filter the comments to help you focus what you want to look for.

As shown below, all of the previous comment-marking tools still remain. As you make any comment or comment mark on the page, a comment field shows up on the right hand side. One surprising issue is that when the comment field is generated, you have to double-click into the field to start making a comment. I'd like to think that after creating the comment, one could simply start typing the comment, but you can't.

Notice in the above image, on the right side, under the "Comments List (6)," there are three icons to the right of the "Find" field. These are shown with all of the options below. These options provides a wide range of options for how the comments are (respectively) sorted, viewed, and even printed.

You can send a PDF out for "Share Review," "Email Review, " Collaborate Live," as well as "Track Reviews." These are all done via Acrobat.com and are very powerful and convenient. For example, if you send an Email Review via Acrobat.com. the recipient can make comments, then click on the "publish Comments" button and everyone who's also reviewing that PDF will get a message saying that there are new comments and once they click on the "Check for New Comments" button on their PDF, the new comments from others will show up on their copy of the PDF.

Share Panel

Share is sort of an amalgam of several things. The main one you first see is the new "SendNow Online." This is a convenient ftp mechanism to send files up to 100 MB to anyone else. This is no different than other similar products such as YouSendIt.com, MediaFire.com, Transfer.com, and many others. You can send larger files, you can you have to use the Premium service and, like all the other similar services, you have to pay for that. Still, it's a very nice option and a good service.

[Since most email applications have relatively small attachment limitations, it becomes very difficult to send large files to other people. What happens here is that your file is uploaded (via ftp) to a holding server. Then an email goes out to the recipient(s) letting them know a file is waiting for them. The recipients can then click on a link in the email and the file can now download to their computer (via ftp) bypassing the email limitation. Ftp is the same mechanism that lets you download just about all files on the web to your computer. The one catch is that you can only do one file at a time so if you have a collection of items you want to send, you need to zip them into an archive prior to sending. Then the recipient needs to unzip them once the file is received.]

The other aspect of Share is that it has buried a wonderful feature that used to be easy to access in Acrobat 9: Collaborate by sharing screens. This lets you share your screen with up to two other people (it used to be three) and you can either look at their screen or they can look at your screen. All they need to access this service is a Browser. You need an Acrobat.com account (the same as your Adobe account). Using this you can share your (or their) screen. You can also change who's running who's cursor. It used to be very obvious and logical to operate, but now that Acrobat X has a Shared Panel, Adobe made it not so obvious or logical:

• Acrobat 9: Go to File Menu, scroll down to Collaborate -> Share My Screen.
• Acrobat X: Go to Share Panel, click on the dropdown arrow below your name (assuming you've sign in) and select "My Account." Then, once your Acrobat.com opens up in your browser, click on the words "Acrobat.com in the upper left. Then click on the link below the text "My meeting room:"

Admittedly, there may be an easier way to do this, but I haven't found it yet.

What's the value of this? Simple, let me give you a true story. Earlier this year my son was in Africa as a volunteer teaching English as a 2nd language. The village he was in had no playground or anything for the young kids so he thought it would be a good idea to make some playground equipment. He drew up some ideas in a CAD program and wanted me to look at the plans. I do woodworking as a hobby and he wanted my advice on his designs. At a predetermined time, we used "Share my screen" so I could look at his screen and see his plans. By talking over Skype, I was able to look at his plans, discuss changes and various design/construction ideas and some time later, the kids in this village were having a great time. Using Acrobat.com and Skype, my son and I were able to easily communicate half-way around the earth very easily. Is that cool or what?

Action Wizard

Action Wizard is a good update to what was earlier called Batch Processing. It works well and is an excellent time saver and process controller. It's similar in concept to creating an Action in Photoshop with the exception that in PS, you do a variety of steps to a sample image and when you are done you've created an action that you save and then use on other images. Here, you select from the Tools tab (recreated on the left in the New Action window) and you select what steps you want to do on an imaginary PDF before you start.

Both processes will get you what you want, but when push comes to shove I think I prefer PS's approach because you get to see the results of what you are trying to do as it happens. Here, you are hoping what you are doing will get the results what you want. Nonetheless, it's easy to edit the Action if it doesn't do exactly what you want and there are options for interrupts for every step. In addition you can export any action to send to others so that (for example) everyone in a group can process a series of PDFs in the same way.

When I started this subject, I mentioned that this is a process controller. If your corporation needs the same steps followed by everyone involved in a particular operation to all be consistent and uniform (ISO 9000 anyone?), Actions created and distributed for use via Acrobat will help to insure that things are done in the correct order and with the same steps and processes.

PDF to Word and Excel

The power and advantage of a PDF is simple: when a document goes from one computer to another, its formatting can change. Just about everyone has received an email where the forced line-breaks cause the text to be broken up into staggered bits of barely readable text. Or you received a Word document where someone spent a lot of time creating columns of text only to have the formatting blow the columns to bits on your computer. Or you received a spreadsheet where the formatting slipped and nothing made any sense. A PDF will preserve what the originator of the document intended.

But then there are those times where you get a PDF created somewhere else or long ago and you do not have access to the original document and now you need to make some changes to the document. While it's certainly possible (albeit painful) to make small subtle changes in a PDF with Acrobat Pro, it's not easy. All this is why it can be handy, important, and/or vital to convert a PDF into a Word or Excel document.

Below are screen shots one of my "convert to Word" tests. I took a PDF that I had with some lab instructions, a combination of images and text. On the top is a screenshot of the original. Below that is the result from using Acrobat 9. This result is clearly a mess: the text was shifted all over the place and the images were mostly trashed (the images were placed in the original from Illustrator). On the bottom is the result from Acrobat X and is mostly stellar. The text is all accessible and most of the images survived. Curiously the shaded regions in the images survived from Acrobat 9 but were completely removed in Acrobat X. Also, about halfway down in Acrobat X version some of the images were squashed beyond recognition.

There is a setting in the conversion of PDF into Word documents that lets you select if you want to either "Retain Flowing Text" or to retain the "Page Layout." If you need to do extensive reediting of the content, be sure to select Retain Flowing Text. My biggest frustration with this feature, as good as it is (and it is very good), is that Acrobat tends to generate strange section breaks in the document. These can be seen in the bottom image (above) as long blue lines across the page. These can be screwy to remove and are nonsensical in their placement and order. The only suggestion I can give to easily remove these is to make the entire document active and then select the "Normal" style in the Style sheets. You will have to do a lot of work to return the document to an edit able state after this, but this was about the only way I found to easily edit out the breaks.

Converting an Excel sheet was a completely different story. Not that it did a worse job than the Word conversion, it's that Acrobat 9 was a complete failure and Acrobat X did a bang-up job.

Below is a PDF of an Excel table and below that is the Acrobat X result. There is no Acrobat 9 result because when I tried the option to have "Tables in Excel Spreadsheet," I got a message stating "Save As was unable to find tables in this document. No file was created." When I tried the option to save as a Word document, I got a page that had an image of the tables, not any viable usable text.

The Acrobat X version did an excellent job of converting the document to a viable Excel document. Admittedly, any formulas were stripped clean and Excel had no clue as to whether the numbers were to be considered Text or Numbers (note the error message on every cell as shown on the bottom of the image above). Regardless, this is a usable and viable Excel chart.

Both the Word and Excel tests here were done with PDFs created by applications and were not scans of text or spreadsheets. The quality of a scan is the beginning of the quality of the final product. If you have a bad scan, you will not have a good end product. Regardless, if your PDF is an image, one of the conversion options is to run OCR as part of the conversion process. If that is done, be on the lookout for errors because there might (probably) be some.

One of the areas where I was disappointed was if you have text with either a numerical progression (1, 2, 3, etc.) or a bullated list (•), no recognition of that is made. As it is, if there is a bullated list and you wish to add more bullated items, you will need to either manually add bullets to your subsequent items, or to manually delete the bullets and turn the selected text into a bullated list. I suppose that the conversion is doing so much already, I want/expect it to do more. Consider that a compliment.

Despite the various potential issues, the conversion from PDF to Word or Excel is remarkable and worthy of attention.

In short...

These are probably the words my editor has been waiting for for this entire review, the end. This is a complex review because the changes to Acrobat have been complex, deep, and profound. I've always been a fan of Acrobat throughout all its versions more for what it could do than how easy it was to do those things. I've never been a big fan of Acrobat's user interface.

There is no doubt that much of what hindered Acrobat in the past is the overly complex and confusing interface it had. I do believe that most of the engineers and help staff at Adobe have spent too many hours in a day telling people who've presented wish-lists for Acrobat that Acrobat could already do such and such for the past x versions. Acrobat is a complex application that can do many many things, and like I said in the very beginning, finding all of those capabilities in the past has been a major challenge.

The bigger problem for users now is not finding out what Acrobat can do, but rather finding the tools you've used for years and where they are now. Corporations may have to spend more bucks on retraining their people on how to use what they've used for years than they will on the software itself. If true, how well that will pay off in the long run is hard to tell. Hopefully now that it is easier to access all of the aspects of any given tool from within any given tab might pay big dividends in the long run. Time will tell.

Despite the advantages to the Panels and tabs, I still feel there is a need for workspaces and only those who've had to juggle 10 PDFs on the screen at the same time will feel there's a need for a tabbed interface.

Why Adobe felt it necessary to rename tools that have been around for ages (e.g., the typewriter tool) is beyond me, and if I could get the engineer who thought up the "Save as..." interface in a dark alley for a few minutes I'd be delighted. I was somewhat disappointed in improvements with OCR, while PDF to Word and Excel blew me away. Portfolios have some nice improvements with the ability to have media files functioning within a Portfolio but the improvements seems to have exacted significant costs to Portfolio's storage size.

With any luck, now that this foundation of the new structure is made, I really do look forward to Acrobat 11 (or will that be XI) to see if they can move on to improvements such as Workspaces, Tabbed documents, significant improvements in OCR, etc.

And, to answer the icon puzzle, the following commands are the correct order of the icons from left to right.

1. Rotate Pages
2. Insert Page
3. More Insert Options
4. Extract Page
5. Export all Images
6. Distribute PDF Form and collect responses

These are all crystal clear, right?

As with most reviews, the final rating is based on all aspects of the application. My real rating is a 2.5 but I am pushing this up to display 3 because of the tremendous strides in PDF to Word and Excel exporting, the efficiency of accessing and working with some of the tools in the Panels, and some of the excellent features distributed throughout the application.

Applelinks Rating:

Buy Adobe Acrobat X Pro

___________ 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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