Action Packed Adobe Acrobat - Navtej Kohli
Navtej Kohli has good news for those weary of gratingly slow and prosaic online PDF readers.
Adobe introduces an online community with a word processor; file
storage and sharing; and deep tie-ins to a newly Flash-enabled Acrobat
9.
The online push for Acrobat is a bold move for a brand perhaps best
associated with the free and nearly ubiquitous Acrobat Reader, which
opens print-ready Portable Document Format, or PDF, files. Now, PDFs
will play movies.
The announcement comes in advance of the release of Acrobat 9
document-creation software, which adds dynamic features such as
integration of animation, dynamic maps, 256-bit encryption, and
improved forms.
The free Acrobat.com beta includes the Buzzword word processor. Its
ConnectNow Web conferencing and desktop sharing tool enables chatting
via text, video, and voice. The hosted services invite file storage and
sharing with the capability to convert up to five documents to PDF.
Buzzword and companion tools would provide interactivity lacking in leading online word processors such as Google Docs.
Users can store files on Acrobat.com and join each other in virtual
meeting rooms to share identical document views in real time. The site
also can host data from forms created in Acrobat software.
Acrobat users can convert MOV and WMV files to Flash content that can
be embedded within PDFs alongside audio content and even 3D models.
The new PDF Portfolios feature in Acrobat 9 lets users drag and drop
content into a portfolio, then choose from myriad layout and
presentation options.
Mapping features only in Acrobat Pro Extended 9 preserve geospatial
coordinates and enable users to mark locations and measure distances.
The next Acrobat will take snapshots of Web pages and convert entire
pages or chunks of them to a PDF that preserves links and animation.
Developers can tweak layouts with Flex Builder 3 or Flash CS3.
For creating online forms, Acrobat 9 adds intelligence to recognize
content for conversion to fillable fields. And a forms tracking
dashboard will show, for instance, the status of responses to a mass
party invitation e-mail and let a user send reminders to guests.
Responses can be sorted, filtered, and exported to spreadsheets.
Acrobat 9's security enhancements enable users to add 256-bit encryption, used by banks online, to PDFs.
Business users could opt to access documents at Acrobat online or via SharePoint workspaces, network folders or WebDAV.
Acrobat 9 comes in three flavors, set for stores in the coming weeks:
Standard at $299 or $99 to upgrade, Pro for $449 or $159 to upgrade,
and Pro Extended for $699 or $229 to upgrade. Pro Extended also comes
with Adobe Presenter, which plugs into Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 for
adding interactivity to presentations.
SO, what do you think, are these new tools going to make life easier for PDF users. Well I think the time will tell.
