The first thing you will notice with Acrobat 6 is how much has visually changed from previous versions. Don't let that prevent you from noticing how much has changed under the hood. And, let us not forget we can now run Distiller in OS X. But, if you are still using OS 9, don't throw version 5 away, because Acrobat 6 only runs in OS X.

PDF, or Portable Document Format, in only ten years old. In fact (piece of trivia), Acrobat version 1 was released ten years ago June 15th. Nowadays, anyone who has looked at an electronic manual, looked at documents on the web, obtained electronic forms from your business, exchanged "works in progress" from colleagues, or prepared artwork for a printshop has realized how ubiquitous PDF documents have become.

The reasons for the PDF format originally were to maintain a document's formatting and appearance--to achieve the "paperless office." We probably all have received a friend's word-processed document that had once been carefully designed with lined up columns and line-breaks now looked all catty-wonker because you and your friend didn't share the same fonts. What a PDF does is let you "print to the computer" instead of print to a printer. As such, the formatting of the electronic document is as stable as the ink on a page.

The main difference between the Acrobat program and the Adobe Reader (formally known as Acrobat Reader), aside from the fact that the latter is free, is that you can create and save PDF documents with the Acrobat Program while you can only read PDF documents with the Reader. Actually you can do a whole lot more with Acrobat than just create PDFs, but more on that later.

With the new Acrobat 6, there is now a full family of four Acrobat programs: Professional, Standard, Elements, and Reader. To better discern the differences between all four, Adobe provides the following list to point out the feature differences.

In the above list, I should point out that Acrobat Elements is only available for the Windows platform and can only be purchased via licensing (not individual sales) and a minimum of 1,000 seats. As you can see, all it can do is what you can already do with a Mac. Also interesting is the change of Acrobat Reader to the new name of Adobe Reader. This new program will not only read Acrobat documents, but also Adobe Forms, eBooks, and Photoshop Albums. Photoshop Albums is Adobe's answer to iPhoto for PCs. There already is some overlap as Apple's Preview will not only open images but also PDF documents.

If all you need to do is to create PDFs and you do not care how well they are made, anyone with OS X can create a PDF from any document now by simply selecting "Output Options" from the print drop-down menu or by clicking on the "Save as PDF" button in the Mac's Print window.

If all your documents are text and you have no images contained within your documents, and you have no plans to expect high quality printed images if you print any of these documents out, than the options provided with Acrobat Elements and Mac OS X are probably sufficient. The reason for this is that, when creating a PDF from Mac OS X, the images are saved at 72 dpi--the same resolution that one finds on the web. So, if you have ever printed out an image-laden PDF created without Acrobat and were disappointed with the results, that's probably why.

Acrobat Professional provides options for embedding fonts and a wide variety of formats for saving images to create a full range of options for smaller size documents or better quality documents.

The heart of this control is a program with the worst interface of any program I've ever encountered (and I've been working with this program since Acrobat version 3), Acrobat Distiller.

Most recently, in Acrobat version 5, Distiller could be opened from the Tools Menu (before that it had to be opened as a separate program). Now it is found in the Advanced Menu -> Acrobat Distiller. Upon opening, the program continues to be a challenge for those who do not read manuals.

When opened, all one sees is a window with a drop-down menu and very few options.

If you go to the File menu in Distiller and select "Open," you may be able to find a document that you can open, but then nothing really will have happened. In fact, you are most likely to get an error message.

The catch is that Distiller only works with postscript documents. What Distiller does is to take a PostScript document and turn it into a PDF with full control on embedded fonts with the added ability to separately control within the same document the dpi of a color image, grayscale image, line-art image, color control, and even what versions of Acrobat can open the completed PDF.

So, where/how does one convert their documents into a PostScript document so Distiller can do its thing? From your Mac's OS X print dialog.

Once you have saved your file as a PostScript document, Distiller can perform its function and turn the document into a PDF. Since you can save ANY document you can print as a PostScript document, you can therefore turn any document into a PDF.

Now all of this is no different from what could be done with Acrobat 5, with the exception that the Distiller now runs natively in OS X. What's different with Acrobat 6 is that now we can create PDFs directly from within any application via a new PDF driver that is installed with Acrobat. After going to your print dialog, you will see it as one of the options available for selection.

Like all of the Print dialog boxes, there are sub-options available for the user:

But here's the great part: Once in the PDF Options window, you can set your PDF formatting to any of the preselected options.

And you'll notice that this is the same set of pre-set options found in Distiller. If the settings of any of the pre-set Settings are not to your liking, you can change any or all of them (General, Images, Fonts, Color, Advanced, PDF/X) and then select "Save As..." This, and any new settings, will show up in the list shown above. This is done from the Settings menu -> Edit Adobe PDF Settings...

But it gets a bit better than that in some programs such as Microsoft Office. To create a PDF from within MS Office, one needs to look for a new selection amongst the Toolbars: "Adobe Acrobat PDFMaker." The new Toolbar is small, has two icons on it, and can easily be added at the end of your regular Toolbar.

The icon on the left simply turns your document into a PDF. The icon on the right does exactly the same thing but also opens (or brings to the front) your e-mail program with a message ready to address and write with the PDF already set as an attachment. I can only think this is for those who do not know how to add (attach) a document to their e-mail. By clicking either of these icons, Distiller does its thing in the background so the quality of PDF you obtain with Adobe Acrobat PDFMaker will be the same high quality obtained if you went through the more circuitous route via creating the PostScript Document and then Distilled the PS to a PDF. Plus, whatever saving option you had selected in either Distiller or the PDF printer driver will be maintained for subsequent PDF document creation.

Another PDF creation technique that has been added to a different program is Acrobat's ability to create PDFs from web pages. In version 5 this was found only under the File menu under "create PDF from web page." This has moved in version 6 to be a submenu from Create PDF. It has also been added to the "Create PDF" dropdown menu located in the menu bar.

Once selected, the process is no different from version 5; you can enter the URL for the web page you seek to save and the number of levels you wish to dig. However, if you only want one level, you can also simply print to the PDF printer driver (as already explained) and you will have your PDF web page.

Also seen in the image above is an option to create PDFs from Multiple Files. This is a new feature that simplifies document assembly. In the past, one would "Insert" pages into a document (this procedure can still be done: (Document (menu) -> Pages -> Insert)), but now one can select a collection of PDF documents, formulate their order, and Acrobat will merge them all into the one document. This is one of those no-brainer features that should have been available years ago, but finally it's done.

If you look at the image shown 3 above, it displays various pre-set settings for the Distiller, two of which may be new to some eyes. These are PDFX1a and PDFX3. These are not necessarily new, as they were (sort of) available in Acrobat 5 but not as readily available. The PDF/X format is a subset of the PDF format that is used to help pre-press houses guarantee spot on colors. That is, when you make a PDF/X document, all fonts must be embedded and all colors must be CMYK, amongst other restrictions. It is just like one of those forms that won't let you continue until you have properly filled out all fields. By ensuring all these parameters, print houses have an excellent shot of printing your work "blind." That is, what they get and print is likely to be exactly what was intended to have left your computer. If you are interested, you can read more on PDF/X from Adobe here, and a summarization of what it all means here.

One of my long standing soap boxes on software is paper documentation—I strongly prefer paper documentation. What you will find with Acrobat is, not surprising, only PDF documentation (in fact, it's the only Adobe product that comes with only PDF documentation). It will once again fall to 3rd party writers to fill in the gap.

The documentation for Acrobat 6 is acceptable at best. I found it frustrating in their discussion of the newly added features, such as the ability to print from Microsoft Office, that they did not provide any clues as to what to look for or where. Likewise, I tried to find the differences between saving a PDF document as "Text (Accessible)" and "Text (Plain)" (as seen in the last image in this article on the subject of the "Save As..." options). I could find no explanation of the differences, a poor explanation of what Text (Accessible) meant, and no explanation of Text (Plain) beyond that it exists.

In addition to the main documentation "Help.pdf" (415 pages) there is a quick help guide. This is automatically opened up when you start Acrobat (you can check a box so that it only opens when requested). Opening the quick help file can be done a variety of ways such as either the Help Menu or (for example) it can be seen in the image above where it states on the bottom of the dropdown window: "How to.. Create PDF."

The final help guide can be started by selecting the "Complete Acrobat 6 Help..." from the Help menu. This is an expanded form of the "How to..." guide and floats so it will always be above the PDF document you are working on.

But on to better things....

One of the areas that pleased and surprised me in Acrobat 6 was the wealth of small things. Following are some examples.

Viewing your PDF documents, or sections therein, has improved considerably with the new zoom tools of Loupe and Pan & Zoom.

Loupe lets you zoom into a small portion of a page up to 6400 times in its own separate window. This window can be resized and moved around on the screen and floats above the page being examined. In the image below you can see an arrow (I created) pointing to a small rectangle that is the subject of the floating Loupe Tool window.

The Pan & Zoom feature is directly related to the Navigation tool seen in both Illustrator and Photoshop. So much so, I can't imagine why they named it something different. Simply, what's inside the red rectangle in the Pan & Zoom floating window will be what's featured in the regular Acrobat window. While Pan & Zoom doesn't display the magnification (as done in Navigator or the Loupe Tool), it does allow one to navigate your pages forward or backward. In addition, if the text on a page is consistently using only part of a page, the Pan & Zoom window does let you set the proper window size to best view the page; a problem often encountered with PDF manuals.

Speaking of navigation, one of the things you might think has disappeared are the page navigation tabs from the top Acrobat Toolbar. In version 6, there are now a total of 13 different Toolbar items, and one can pick and choose which ones to display and in what order (View menu -> Toolbars -> (select from them)). There also is a menu selection for selecting them all. For those with big screens, this is a good thing.

Speaking of big screens, or for those who do not have 25 inch monitors, one can now word-wrap bookmark text and change the font size (small, medium, or large) for the bookmark text.

One of the new features in Acrobat 5 was it's ability to save a PDF as something that is not a PDF, most notably (amongst other formats) was the "Rich Text Format." This meant that one could save a PDF into a document that could be opened by MS Word. The one catch was that there was a paragraph return at the end of every line. Acrobat 6 has taken the "Save as..." feature and expanded significantly. As can be seen below, on the left is the "Save As..." list from Acrobat 5, on the right is the "Save As..." list from Acrobat 6.

However, don't break out the champaign yet, as I found saving a PDF into an RTF or Word document extremely disappointing. If there is any kind of formatting, the document will end up very distorted. Sadly, if you have no access to the original document, you might be best off to save the PDF as a text document and reformat it to your wishes or to save the page(s) as a TIFF document and then use an OCR package to convert it into text; most OCR programs can do a much better job of maintaining the look and feel of the original document than Acrobat 6. In short: do not lose your original documents.

Probably the biggest disappointment with Acrobat 6 is the constant message that Adobe seems to be saying to Mac users. When you look at the "New Features" in the PDF manual, the words "Windows only" consistently precede far too many of the new features. For example, in the beginning of the PDF manual, the new features of version 6 are presented. The first category presented is the new techniques for creating PDF documents, of which there are eight. Of these eight, five are exclusive to, or focused on, Windows only approaches. For example, in Windows, one can right-click (contextual menu) a document on the desktop and select it to create a PDF. On the other hand, one can create one-click PDF creation of Microsoft Visio, Project and Autodesk AutoCAD--none of which exist on the Mac platform. It would be nice if Adobe tossed us a bone and let us have one-click PDF creation of Keynote presentation. But alas, not yet.

Also disappointing are two long standing wishes of mine that still have not been fulfilled: First, while one can control the default magnification that PDF documents open, one cannot stop a PDF from opening across one's entire screen. If I am depending upon a PDF manual (and all too often I am), I do not want the program I'm trying to learn being covered up with the manual explaining how to use the program. I want to see as much of both as I can. As such, I want the PDF to only be as wide as the page of the document, not as wide as my screen. I also want the Bookmark section closed as a default.

Secondly, I am still surprised that one still has no control on the size of fields when creating forms. That is, if I'm creating a form and I want all the one-line text fields to be 16 pixels tall, I can't. Even with the new measuring tools, I can't properly measure the size of a form's field and duplicate that to a new field.

There is a frustrating conundrum with the release of Acrobat 6. It is a very good product update. If you are creating pre-press documents, you will be very very happy with the new features. If you enjoy the power of Distiller for creating specially tuned PDFs for different environments, you will enjoy not only the new features, but also that you can now work in OS X. If you work in a collaborative environment, you will certainly enjoy the evolved tools for group-working with Acrobat 6. However, it seems that Adobe is almost intent on leaving Mac users out of potential corporate environments. Consider: one of the new features only available for Windows is "Browser Based Reviews." Let me quote from the manual:

["Managed browser-based review (Windows) If everyone in your review is using a Windows system, you can set up a browser-based review. Just as with e-mail-based reviews, Acrobat 6.0 includes functionality to help with every stage of the browser-based review. For example, when you start a browser-based review, participants receive an e-mail message with an attached setup file. When reviewers open this attachment, a copy of the PDF document opens in a Web browser and their review settings are configured."]

If you are working in a mixed platform environment and a manager sees this feature and wishes to use it, you can kiss your Mac goodby.

I have to admit ignorance as to whether this (and other) features are not available for Macs because it's just not possible to program these features or if Adobe didn't want to spend the man hours to make it happen. I also do not know if these are features that might appear in the Mac version in the 6.0.1 upgrade. We can hope.

Despite these digressions, do not not purchase this upgrade if you wish to "get back" at Adobe. The fewer Macs that buy the upgrade, the less incentive there is to make these features available for Macs. But that doesn't stop you from getting the product, and complaining. Be nice, don't be nasty. But when the wheel isn't making noise, it isn't likely to get any grease.

Were there more parity between the Mac and PC version, giving Acrobat 6 a 5 "A dot" review would have been a piece of cake. But the squeaky wheel starts here and I'm giving it 4. I would like to give it even fewer, but that would be an injustice to an otherwise fine product and (an otherwise) very good upgrade.

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