Acrobat Pro 9 Turns Powerful New Tricks

For Jeremy Schultz’s sto­ry on the PDF Portfolio fea­ture of Acrobat 9 Professional, click here. For the Acrobat 9 Pro press release sto­ry, click here.

Adobe Acrobat is all new.

Well, actu­al­ly, that’s not com­plete­ly true. The Acrobat appli­ca­tion you’ve known and loved to make and edit PDFs and share is still the same. But the new fea­tures that it includes will make it feel like a new appli­ca­tion. We recent­ly had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to seen the new Acrobat Pro 9 in action and we were very impressed. It’s got new approach­es to PDF-based work­flows – col­lab­o­ra­tion, shar­ing, com­par­ing, and show­ing off – that show off a new­ly evolved Acrobat – an ever more inter­con­nect­ed and col­lab­o­ra­tive tool than Acrobat’s ever been before.

The new Acrobat Pro improves in three very impor­tant ways: Presentation, Participation, and Production.

Presentation: Your PDF Collection Is Now A Slick Portfolio

Perhaps the most imme­di­ate ben­e­fit the user can enjoy with Acrobat Pro 9 out of the box is the new PDF Portfolio. It will change the way you think of PDFs as a vehi­cle for con­tent delivery.

The way things were done before you’d assem­ble a group of PDFs into a multi-page PDF binder in Acrobat, and that worked real­ly well. But it was rather sta­t­ic and with­out flash, and who does­n’t want to wow some­one with a port­fo­lio (hands, any­one? Didn’t thinks so). Now, with PDF Portfolio, you have the flash … and you now have the Flash.

One option for the front end of your PDF Portfolio – dynam­ic, Flash-based, fun to use, and slick. Very impres­sive. (illus­tra­tion cour­tesy Adobe)

Creating a PDF Portfolio is rather sim­ple … a sin­gle menu pull­down cre­ates the emp­ty port­fo­lio, and adding files (or entire fold­ers) to the port­fo­lio is as sim­ple as select­ing … or even dragging-and-dropping. A sim­ple click enables one of sev­er­al dis­play options, from a sim­ple grid to a web-page style dis­play on a back­ground image to a slid­ing ani­mat­ed row. Flash nav­i­ga­tion is eas­i­ly under­stood and eas­i­ly used.

The pre­sen­ta­tion bonan­za does­n’t stop there, how­ev­er. Going from this stage is a sim­ple step to adding a cus­tomized wel­come and head­er page that can con­tain a pho­to, cus­tom text, or a movie file. Acrobat’s new grokking of Flash and movie files allow the user to include more than screen­grabs … now FLV and SWF con­tent can actu­al­ly become part of the port­fo­lio. The dif­fer­ence between the usu­al sta­t­ic col­lec­tion of doc­u­ments and live­ly con­tent pow­ered by video should be obvi­ous, and the PDF Porfolio cre­ation process makes it very near­ly child’s-play.

Participation: New Ways To Play Well With Others

Acrobat has lat­ter­ly pro­vid­ed ways to col­lab­o­rate, gath­er, and share that have worked well. Acrobat Connect pro­vides great ways to do a meet­ing, and this author him­self has enjoyed the sheer con­ve­nience that PDF forms and dig­i­tal sign­ing provides.

With the new col­lab­o­ra­tive tools, though, Acrobat Pro 9 (if the read­er will excuse the expres­sion) kicks it up to the next lev­el. Not only will you be able ren­dezvous as before, but now you’ll actu­al­ly be able to show peo­ple exact­ly what you’re talk­ing about. Before, telling some­one to look at a cer­tain spot on a doc­u­ment you’re col­lab­o­rat­ing or get­ting com­ments on over the phone or by email sound­ed rather much like a spouse giv­ing their part­ner instruc­tion on scratch­ing their back. 

Sometimes awk­ward? You bet.

The new Acrobat Pro 9 (and Reader 9) make it easy by syn­chro­niz­ing views. What this is is what it says; you’re dis­cussing a doc­u­ment with col­lab­o­ra­tors, zero­ing in on a doc­u­ment area of con­cern, and instead of giv­ing direc­tions to your col­leagues, you are graph­i­cal­ly show­ing them by zoom­ing in on the con­tent and hav­ing thi­er views match yours.

Feels bet­ter? We thought it would.

Improvied col­lab­o­ra­tion does­n’t stop there. Adobe have upped that game by enhanc­ing the Tracker. You’ll now know who’s com­ment­ed and have it all up in a cen­tral dash­board. You can have the review on a shared fold­er on your home machine or use the host­ed ser­vices expect­ed to be made avail­able at Acrobat​.com. Forms cre­ation has been spiffed up as well. And an excit­ing new fea­ture allows users to com­pare PDFs to see how many changes have occurred and who amongst the teams have made them, and what they were. 

Production: The Power of the PDF Workflow

As Adobe have moved through the evo­lu­tion of the Creative Suite, in the mere time passed since the first Creative Suite debuted, work­flows industry-wide have seemed to begin depend­ing on PDFs for out­put for press. The cur­rent range of PDF/X stan­dards tai­lored for dif­fer­ent needs only rein­force this impres­sion. And Acrobat Pro 9 answers this need by improved pro­duc­tion tools.

The Overprint Preview has been improved, with intel­li­gence; it now works when need­ed, instead of hav­ing to be man­u­al­ly acti­vat­ed. The default is to auto­mat­i­cal­ly turn on when­ev­er a PDF/X file is encoun­tered, but this can be cus­tomized so that the so-called Intelligent Overprint Preview can work seam­less­ly in your work­flow, when­ev­er it’s needed.

New improved Output Preview allows the artist to view a wealth of file infor­ma­tion (such as line art, any­thing not CMYK, line art, live as opposed to out­lined text, num­ber of Pantone spots) and iden­ti­fy poten­tial trou­ble spots. Object Inspector allows the artist to get snoopy, find­ing detailed infor­ma­tion on all objects below the select­ed point. Graphic res­o­lu­tion, col­or mod­el, col­or pro­file, and as much as you can want to know about the objects in the doc­u­ment at the point unfold like a flower blossoming.

Once those spots have been found, the pro­duc­tion artist can move into cor­rect­ing them with ithe improved col­or con­ver­sion tool, which is infi­nite­ly cus­tomiz­able. You can also ver­i­fy against PDF/X stan­dards with a singile click and an infor­ma­tion pane. Preflighting? The enhanced Acrobat Pro 9 pre­flight­ing is admirably thor­ough and includes an eye-glazing amount of fix­ups to cor­rect pre­flight problems.

Those have been wait­ing for a PDF tool to begin to tie every­thing togeth­er under a sol­id PDF work­flow may well have found what they are look­ing for in Acrobat Pro 9. From show­ing off to shar­ing around to fix­ing things, this new ver­sion will take your PDF work­flow game about as far as you can make it go. 

Adobe real­ly hits it out of the park with this one.

For more infor­ma­tion on Adobe Acrobat Pro 9, includ­ing upgrade paths and pric­ing as part of the Adobe Creative Suite 3.3, go to http://​www​.adobe​.com/​p​r​o​d​u​c​t​s​/​c​r​e​a​t​i​v​e​s​u​i​t​e​/​a​c​r​o​b​atpro/. See also Jeremy Schultz’s pub­lish­ing of the Acrobat Pro 9 announce­ment at this arti­cle here.