Adobe Acrobat 5.0

Rating:
Summary: Still with a few Bugs
Review: Overall, the product works well and is integraded nicely with Microsoft Word. The thumbnail feature works only sporadically for me, and this seems to be a problem for other site designers as well as evidenced by the number of sites also not showing thumbnails. In addition, it often crashes if not launched immediately after freshly booting the machine.

Rating:
Summary: Does Not Work As Advertised
Review: Adobe claims Acrobat will PDF "any" document. This is not true. Example: It will PDF a Microsoft Word document if the document dimentions are set at 8.5 x 11 inch, but it certainly will not PDF a small paperback size book such as 6 x 9 size. The top of each page will be cut off and table of contents will not form, etc. A very strong defect in this Acrobat program that should be fixed. As a book publisher, we contacted Adobe about a year ago on this problem and they never responded back to us. This defect cripples the Acrobat program. Any book you plan to publish had better be 8.5 x 11. No other sizes will work, using Microsoft Word software. We even contacted a bestselling PDF author and even he could not get Acrobat to PDF a small book size in Microsoft Word. Yes, there are settings to select in Acrobat to PDF smaller size documents, but still the Acrobat software fails to make the adjustments and PDF the document. A very major and persistant problem Adobe has refused to correct. Acrobat will not PDF "any" document, as advertised.

Rating:
Summary: Great Product
Review: This product is the best. Adobe hasn't made the adobe acrobat readers good when they started out early. But now it is like they are a new company. This program is great. It is definetly worth your money. mI would recomend this to people using it for personal use, buisness use or cooperate use. A great product with lots of uses.

Rating:
Summary: Outstanding! for .PDF
Review: Use this software frequently in day-to-day communications. The ability to lock files to prevent printing/editing is a great feature. Especially if you have something you don't want distributed in paper format! Loaded with many other features too numerous to mention.

Rating:
Summary: Paper capture?
Review: this essential paper capture utility is missing!!! adobe expects me to pay per page capture through online fees? how ridiculous. improvements aren't dramatic, and the missing paper capture hurts it.

Rating:
Summary: A complete solution.
Review: Fonts:

As well as its cross platform performance Acrobat 5 and its predecessors have the ability to contain any non-standard fonts so that your document will not be disturbed if the Acrobat Reader in someone else's machine doesn't have the font that you set the document with. So if you decided to use lots of Klingon Sans Serif Bold, for example, and embedded it into your document the recipient's reader would render the pages accordingly instead of substituting the nearest it could find. The downside is, that a document of only 10 KB without any embedded fonts can end up at 300KB or more when fonts are embedded.

A good example of this was Stephen King's, The Plant, distributed in the PDF format. Using standard fonts, and no embedding, the individual episodes would have been about 150 - 200 KB instead of in excess of 1.0 MB.

So care should be exercised with regard to ultimate document compatibility, and ask yourself - do I really need all those non-standard fonts? I find Times New Roman to be a very satisfactory choice for screen ad printing, and it doesn't need to be embedded.

Colour:

Sometimes it may be necessary to ensure that coloured parts of a document are reproducible to a high degree of accuracy. When you Distil a document you have the option to tag your document with colour profile details so that those with equipment capable of working with ICC profiles will be consistent with you. This adds a lot of size to your file. So, as with fonts, only tag if really required. Be sure to check your Distiller job option settings under the colour management tab, and check the tag or don't tag box accordingly, since installing Acrobat into different versions of an OS can have different default settings, leading to unintentional, and confusing results.

Rating:
Summary: Essential for web designers and for developing handheld docs
Review: Once I got Acrobat, I wondered how I lived without it. One of the most useful features is the PDF printer, where you can print ANY file (such as an html page from a website, for example) to a PDF format, complete with graphics. The software creates a "virtual printer" that allows you to use the print command and create a PDF instead of printing out to your DeskJet.

Acrobat 5.0 can convert any file type using the print command, into a PDF, which, when viewed by someone with the free Acrobat Reader, can be read online or viewed with the reader and printed out. The advantage of the PDF format means that editing, formatting on any monitor, any computer looks as it should on anyone computer, regardless of the monitor's resolution setting or computer platform.

Another feature, new in version 5.0 is "reflow." Next to the Actual View, Fit Page and Fit Width icons is the new option, Reflow. Select this and the current page's text will automatically "reflow" or reformat to fit the current window size. Change the window size or zoom, and the text automatically reflows to accommodate! This may seem unnecessary for most applications, but consider the handheld, ie Palm, Handspring or Visor. These devices use smaller screens and zoom-in. If you develop applications or documents to be used on handhelds, this feature is useful to check if you have tagged your PDF correctly for these applications. A nice feature, indeed.

One word of caution: if you have an older Adobe Reader, you may need to upgrade your reader to use files created with Adobe Acrobat 5.0. If you put PDF files on your website, you should indicate the version of reader your visitors should use.

Rating:
Summary: Useful at Work and at Home -- a lifesaver!
Review: I purchased this item at work, and liked it so much, that I purchased my own copy for personal use.

Installation was fairly quick, and did not cause me any problems. Product registration was very easy, since Adobe has an intuitive web-based registration system.

At work, I use the application to convert all types of documents to PDFs. Too often, fellow workers couldn't read some of the files my team created - MapInfo files, Visio files, etc. Being able to "distill" these files into PDFs made our lives easier, and made posting items to our intranet quick and easy. Distilling is sooooo easy! It is just like printing to a printer, only you print to Acrobat Distiller. Set up the print quality, paper orientation, and paper size just as though you were printing to an attached or networked printer.

I am not an expert user, and I don't create documents in Acrobat. However, I have used the application to add links and such to my company newsletter. This was easy to do, and added an appreciated level of interactivity.

Unlike one reviewer stated, documents may look different from computer to computer - depending on the fonts you are using. For example, I use a font called "Dauphin" in the newsletter, but not many people have this font installed on their PCs. Acrobat searches for a substitute font, and uses its own intelligence (don't know how this works) to select something to use in its place. So, if you plan on using obscure fonts, make sure others have them, too. The best thing to do is to try your best to use common fonts (Comic Sans, Arial, Garamond, Times New Roman, etc.).

At home, I use it to convert scanned images (like .tif files) to PDFs. The PDFs are easier to work with (combining multiple pdfs into a single pdf document), and they usually take up less space than tifs. If you have a scanner, and you scan things like your bank records, or other documents, this can be a real space saver, and a real help in organizing documents electronically.

I look forward to learning more about Adobe Acrobat, and I will probably purchase a guide to do so. Although Adobe's pdf-based manual looks pretty good, it is too much of a hassle to try and "flip" through it to find the things that I want. This pdf manual is the only drawback to the application. I don't know how much it would add to the product cost to include a printed version, but since buyers are shelling out over [price] for the app, I don't think an extra [price] will chase anyone away.

Rating:
Summary: Exceptionally long save time, cant remove from drive...
Review: The save time on the typical sheet I was scanning and then saving thru distiller 4.0 jumped from 1 or 2 seconds to 16 seconds in distiller 5.0... making the program obsolete for serious scanning projects. After removing the program from the harddrive using program removal from windows it now gives fatal errors and locks up the computer. Will have to re-format the hard drive now to clear the problems... Adobe does it again.

Rating:
Summary: A must if you want to archive and share documents
Review: How many pices of paper do you have sitting around waiting to be filed? Need a list and can't find it? How about your kids report card? I find the ability to scan into PDF and then archive documents invaluable. In particular out of date manuals, etc I scan and burn to CD-ROM. Several drawers of file cabinet space can be stored on a single CD. PDF format means you can browse your documents with a browser.

The other advantage is sending complex data like CAD drawings to someone. You can never know if they will have a viewer or the same kind of computer etc. Sending them a PDF is safe because not only will they probably be able to see it on their computer, if they can't they can put it on a floppy and take it to any print shop and get a hard copy!