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Adobe blends Flash with Acrobat in Acrobat Pro

Posted by Kathleen Maher on July 28th 2008 | Discuss
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Adobe’s CS3 brought new interoperability between the company’s product lines, especially by extending support for Acrobat throughout the content-creation tools, making PDF a common format for markups. With Acrobat 9.0 Adobe has increased the integration of Flash in Acrobat. It’s safe to say that this is a trend users can expect to see throughout the product line as Adobe increases the ability of its products to work together and to create interactive pieces. One of the earliest products to be released for Adobe’s next gen is Acrobat 9 Pro, which will be integrated into the Creative Suite 3.3 Design Premium and Standard editions.

The ability to create Portfolios is the blockbuster feature of Acrobat 9. Using Portfolios, it’s easy to combine a variety of different file formats into an interactive presentation that can be accessed using Acrobat Reader 9.0. Users can combine any kind of files, PDFs, video, audio, images, etc. into a PDF file and send the package off to a customer who might want to review images, a friend who might enjoy a package of favorite songs and video, or, in the case of publishing, one can send a project complete with comps and instructions to a contractor. At the heart of it, the Portfolio feature is just plain fun but it’s also a valuable collaboration tool.

In addition to being able to access Portfolios using the latest version of Acrobat Reader, users are also given a free account on Acrobat.com where they can post Portfolios and collaborate with others who can get there via the free Acrobat Reader if they don’t have Acrobat Pro. Advanced collaboration is available through Adobe’s ConnectNow feature letting users set up web-based meetings where they share their desktops, use live chat, and share online white boards.

The Portfolio tool lets users package images, videos, audio files, text, etc. into an interactive package that can be navigated using simple tools. The tools in Acrobat Pro are dead easy and in Acrobat Pro Extended, Adobe adds the ability to customize templates.
(Source: Adobe)

Interactivity is a major theme for Adobe these days and it plays a major role in the many new features in Acrobat. For example, users can convert web pages to PDF and can include rich interactive media that might be embedded in the page. In addition, users working with Adobe’s CS3 web tools have access to Fireworks, which includes a web prototyping page. These prototypes with all the links and Flash content can be saved as PDFs for review and approval.

One of the early indicators of Adobe’s plans for the future was the inclusion of PDF support in Adobe’s video tools. It was slap in the head obvious to let video professionals add notes to a production in progress to alert others on a project to a problem that had to be fixed—for instance, video can be sent to the audio professional with a note to fix stray noises etc. Portfolio will make it even easier to package up a product and send it off to a colleague for more work.

For print professionals, Adobe has added Overprint Preview to Acrobat. This feature shows the interaction between overlapping objects so people using Acrobat 9 Pro and Acrobat 9 Reader can toggle on and off overlapping objects. Adobe has also increased support for color, allowing users to switch from one color space to another, RGB to CMYK, convert RGB and CMYK blacks to solid black, and also to map one color to another color including Pantone spot colors.

More mundane on the surface, users can compare PDF documents to see what has changed. However, for print professionals, the feature extends to support for text formatting, images, line weights and backgrounds. It also includes extended support for forms that makes it even easier to create PDF forms and collect data from forms to import into a spreadsheet. Support for QuickBooks is also included.

There is, you might notice, an abundance of freeness in these new features, meaning Adobe is giving away a bunch of capabilities for free—online meeting space, online storage—to the tune of 20 GB, and there’s more free stuff through Photoshop Express and Premiere Express where users can upload and share photos and images. Enjoy it, Adobe says it’s still actively working out the business model for its online services. You can bet that not everything will remain free. However, Adobe is going to do its best to create a pleasant and fun online environment that will keep users engaged enough to want to pay incremental fees for storage and services—it’s a volume game and Adobe is just getting started (Google, has obviously helped develop this market and they’re the model to beat at the moment.)

With Acrobat Pro Extended, Adobe added support for 3D. There is limited support for 3D in Acrobat Pro via U3D. You can bring in U3D 3D objects, place them in a PDF and manipulate them in a Window. However for advanced 3D capabilities, you have to go to Acrobat Pro Extended 9. If you do, you can also convert files from the most common CAD formats to U3D.

And while we’re on the subject of Adobe Pro Extended, which adds features for specific professional niches such as CAD, medical, and geospatial, the one feature that has me thinking about springing for the $299 upgrade (full price $699) is the ability to add voice, music, animation, etc. to Microsoft Power Point slides so you can easily create an interactive presentation that can be distributed online.

This might not be a totally good thing as people create interactive presentations that are every bit as tedious and boring as their live versions, but at least we don’t have to sit in a dark room and think about lunch while it’s going on.

Does it work?

As is probably obvious, I had a great time testing out the Portfolio feature. I really appreciated the ease of use, not always a given in Adobe’s professional productions. However, there does seem to be a little bit of rawness in the Acrobat.now feature. To be fair, the company has plastered Beta all over the site and, as always in these cases, maybe it’s just me. After all, I’m writing this after a very short introductory period with the program. As of this writing, the Portfolio feature isn’t supported in Acrobat.com though you can let people download your portfolios and view it on their desktop via AIR.

Things like embedded 3D models in a document are still very application-specific and all the participants are not exactly being helpful. Adobe lets you embed a 3D model in a window—this makes sense for users who might want to share and collaborate on a model or add a model to complement documentation but it’s a tad awkward for users who don’t work in 3D regularly and conversion from various file formats to U3D has not been predictable. If it’s just a matter of sharing 3D CAD data, there are a variety of viewers available for free or for very lower cost and Autodesk has their own which ensures lines, colors, dimensions, etc. are all communicated correctly. As I explored this, looking for conversion tools, reading forums and the frustrations of users, and attempting to understand the arcane workaround devised by CAD geeks, I could feel my life getting shorter.

We have worked with Acrobat 3D Pro, the forerunner to Acrobat Pro Extended’s 3D features, and found it to be capable and generally it worked as expected—although we felt no eagerness to actually use it. For obvious reasons, Adobe has given up on Acrobat 3D and simply maintained the work they’ve already done. In general, the CAD industry has not gotten behind Acrobat 3D. CAD workers often don’t work like Adobe 3D Pro expected them to.

However, information workers, people creating technical documentation, multimedia professionals, webmasters, editors, layout artists, etc. do work like Adobe expects them to and that’s where the company is putting its efforts.

Adobe is hard to compete with when it stays in its own backyard. As the company adds capabilities for specific market segments, it has to slog through some usability issues, but when it brings users into its world as it is, doing with Portfolio and also, we hope, the ability to add multimedia and interactivity to PowerPoint for presentations, it is opening up a new world for users.

On other fronts, the work that Adobe has done with Acrobat 9.0 has been to make it more efficient. It opens up considerably faster than its predecessors and, for many, that might well be among the most valuable new features. It shows that Adobe is serious about making its tools more practical for all users. There are signs that Adobe is working on all its products to optimize them for new hardware, to run cleaner, and to be easier to figure out from a dead start. If Acrobat 9.0 is an indication, Adobe is making good on its word. Acrobat 9 Pro, $449.