Acrobat 7 Pro, An Eye On Creative Pros

Adobe announced yesterday the immediate availability of Acrobat 7, including Standard, Professional, and the license-only Elements.

Adobe Acrobat 7 Professional boxshot, Adobe 7 Professional
Adobe Acrobat 7 Professional

Acrobat 7 includes numer­ous enhance­ments and refine­ments to fea­tures already in place in ver­sion 6, but it also includes sev­er­al new fea­tures. Most notably is the abil­i­ty for doc­u­ment cre­ators to acti­vate document-specific review and markup fea­tures for users who only have Adobe Reader—something only pre­vi­ous­ly only pos­si­ble with a US$75,000 serv­er package.

For cre­ative pro­fes­sion­als the key draw to Acrobat 7 Professional will be an expan­sion of 6’s robust pre­flight util­i­ty to a pre­flight and cor­rec­tion tool. Common for-press PDF issues such as incor­rect inks, wrong col­or spaces (i.e. images in RGB), trap erors, and stroke weight prob­lems can all be fixed with­in Acrobat 7 with­out the need for regen­er­a­tion of the PDF from the orig­i­nal source application.

The new ver­sion also adds more col­lab­o­ra­tive work­flow fea­tures. Beginning with the abil­i­ty to enable review and markup for clients with the free Adobe Reader, Acrobat 7 Professional also allows Reader clients to view over­print priv­iews. Pre-press work­flows will ben­e­fit from the new JDF-compliant prod­uct def­i­n­i­tions for accu­rate job tick­et­ing, and the abil­i­ty to con­vert pre-flight results into PDF.

Adobe also lis­tened to the demands of cre­ative and pro­duc­tion per­son­nel and added to the already exten­sive list of on-demand PDF con­ver­sion fil­ters the regret­tably nec­es­sary Microsoft Publisher con­ver­tor (Windows only). Now, like Word, Excel, and numer­ous oth­er file for­mats, Acrobat 7 Professional can instant­ly con­vert Publisher files into press-ready PDFs with­out the need to open the file Publisher and print to the Create Adobe PDF vir­tu­al printer.

With the suc­cess of Photoshop CS’s anti-piracy prod­uct acti­va­tion scheme under Windows, Adobe has added the same acti­va­tion into Acrobat 7 (Professional and Standard). During instal­la­tion Acrobat will con­tact the Adobe Activation Server via an Internet con­nec­tion to enable use of the software.

Acrobat 7 Professional and Standard is avail­able for pur­chase from Adobe as a stand­alone appli­ca­tion, and Acrobat 7 Professional will be includ­ed in the upcom­ing 1.3 main­te­nance release of Adobe Creative Suite Premium, which also includes cur­rent ver­sions of InDesign CS, Photoshop CS, Illustrator CS, GoLive CS, and Version Cue.

Also avail­able is Adobe Reader 7.0, includ­ing a pub­lic beta for the Linux oper­at­ing sys­tem. Since it was intro­duced in 1993 Adobe has dis­trib­uted over half-a-bilion copies of Adobe Reader (for­mer­ly Acrobat Reader).

If Adobe adheres to the 18 month release sched­ule announced when Creative Suite debuted in October 2003, a new Creative Suite, with the next ver­sions of its con­stituent prod­ucts, should be released in Spring 2005. Presumably Acrobat 7 Professional will remain a part of the suite.