Adobe Systems Acrobat Professional 8.0

Confusion reigns about Acrobat. Many people mistakenly believe that 'Acrobat' refers to the free PDF (portable document format) reader that's supplied with many applications. In fact, that product is known simply as Adobe Reader. It's easy to see how the mix-up came about: in the past Adobe used to call this program Acrobat Reader.

Using Acrobat Professional, PDFs can be created from a range of document types and merged into a single continuous document that you scroll through sequentially like a book, complete with page numbers, or used as a repository for all sorts of research elements. These can be extrapolated so specific chapters, paragraphs or illustrations are included in the PDF, without having to chop out and reference items by hand. Office applications retain their attributes using this way of saving Acrobat PDFs. Microsoft Outlook and Lotus Notes emails can also be filed and combined in this way, using a built-in tool called PDFMaker.

Publishing tool

Since a PDF is in essence a snapshot of another document with both fonts and graphics embedded within it, it's ideal for publishing work. Supply a layout as a PDF and the printer has an exact copy of how the pages ought to look typographically, as well as image- and colour-wise. And having an electronic proof is an invaluable fallback if things should go wrong and a claim needs to be made for shoddy workmanship.

This latter aspect is what makes Acrobat Pro useful for many tasks besides creating PDFs for their own sake. As a fixed, non-editable document, PDFs are a fantastic way of publishing lengthy reports and other important documents on the web or a company intranet. They can be compressed to very small file sizes, downloaded on demand and encrypted to make them tamper proof.

This makes them far and away more useful than a word-processed document. They prevent others being able to copy-and-paste text, graphics or both, making plagiarism and copyright theft far harder. Users can encrypt PDFs for sending via email as well as locking up the document itself.

This means that PDFs can be invaluable in all sorts of scenarios such as legal offices, architectural practices and design agencies, as well as governmental, educational establishments and for public bodies.

Acrobat is extensible, so you can embed page, keyword and section links and include hyperlinks to online and offline web pages and other documents. Acrobat works well, for instance, with Flash - another big gun in the Adobe arsenal. It's useful for collaborative projects too. PDFs can be shared around a team with everyone invited to add comments, corrections and other input directly on to the document, or as footnotes that others can selectively see and to which they can add their own feedback.

Version 8.0 includes Start Meeting. With this users can share the same workscreen with others as they collaborate via a Web-conferencing session. For advanced Microsoft Office users, there's the option of using SharePoint, too. Acrobat's LiveCycle Designer can create forms for online research purposes as well as standard day-to-day form-filling. There are templates for expense claim forms and purchase ledgers, and letter-based documents requesting a job quote.

Standard forms can also be imported. We were quickly able to edit the Customer satisfaction survey template for our sample start-up company to quickly solicit feedback on how well our first few customers had found our performance.