When you talk about graphics software, the components of Adobe Creative Suite 2 almost certainly are the first to come to mind. Being the longtime leader does not always mean a program is the best out there, of course, but it at least means the company is doing something right. To get to the bottom of whether Photoshop and its siblings are as good as their market numbers would indicate, OfB Labs took two moderately experienced graphics software users who had not used Adobe's products before, and tracked the experience of using the CS suite.
For Mac users, Photoshop has pretty much the entire market to itself. With Corel pulling out its flagship suite with the last release, the only well known competitor on the platform is the Free Software GNU Image Manipulation Tool (GIMP). In addition to the Gimp, we can consider software on the Windows side of the picture, where there remains two major offerings from Corel: Draw on the high-end and Paint Shop Pro on the lower end.
We will look at Photoshop itself in the near future, but in this first part of the review series, we look at another one of the CS components, Adobe Acrobat Professional. Although the purpose of Acrobat is fairly obvious to most, it might not be completely obvious why you need it. Mac users are able to output to PDF files anything printable, so why would you want a separate, substantially priced package to do the same thing?
There are a number of reasons. First, and perhaps best known to most, is the ability for commenting. When collaborating on a PDF document among multiple people, tools to do highlighting, place stamps (such as “sign here”), create drawings and so on are highly useful. The additional ability to add form elements, such as text boxes and radio buttons helps in providing forms that can be interactively filled out before being printed.
Another justification for Acrobat is the ability to create subdivisions in a work, such as chapters, sections and so on, that can be navigated in the tree view of most PDF readers. While the Mac OS X print facility will create a PDF, a fifty or one hundred page PDF file created in such fashion will lack the easy navigation that is highly important. Moreover, other related tools, such as hyperlinks, are missing from Mac OS X's PDF creation process. This is also true of the similar feature in KDE on Linux, Corel WordPerfect Office and, it seems reasonable to expect, in the future PDF creation support of Microsoft Office. While Text Edit can edit Word documents, it is not a replacement for Word, at least for serious word processing users, and the same is very much true with Adobe Acrobat as compared to these lightweight PDF creation facilities.
The Acrobat package also comes loaded with a truckload of other features. Important to Internet distribution is the ability to set different levels of compression/quality. When saving a PDF document, the user is presented with a wealth of options concerning not only quality, but also what level of compatibility with previous versions of Reader compatibility must be maintained.
The Collections function proves useful for those dealing with large amounts of related PDF documents. The simple, friendly interface allows one to place the related documents into folder-like structures without moving the actual PDF files from their original locations. Once placed there, a thumbnail of each document is visible next to its name, and clicking on the document brings up a thumbnail of each page for easy previewing before opening the document. The toolbar provides quick access to functions to print, e-mail and combine PDF documents. It also includes a history of previously opened PDF documents — be they local documents opened up directly in Acrobat or web-based ones opened using the Acrobat plug-in.
A feature we were particularly impressed with was the included OCR functionality. When scanning a flyer into Acrobat, it was able to do a highly laudable job of reading the characters and making them selectable while preserving the visual appearance of the scanned document, as if we had merely created an image rather than an OCR processed document. While like any OCR software, the conversion was not error free, it was quite good. Acrobat has numerous other niceties, such as integration with Office:mac, allowing for direct access to its creation facility through the Office toolbars.
It should be noted that, like other parts of the CS suite, Acrobat 7 is extremely resource hungry. Both the browser plug-in for Safari and the standalone program often put a strain on our PowerMac G5 dual 2.7 GHz system equipped with 1.5 GB of ram. Obviously, features such as thumbnail previewing of each page contributes to the much more substantial computing power Acrobat seems to desire over a lightweight viewer such as Apple's Preview.
While Acrobat is not a program that is warranted for every user, it is undoubtedly useful and worth looking into. Though not everyone will need it, it is certainly a worthy asset to the Creative Suite — one that most users will surely derive some benefit from. Even if you are managing with less serious PDF creation tools, it may pay to look at what you are missing: it was not obvious to us going into the process exactly what would be gained by using Acrobat, but we have come to appreciate the features enough that we would not want to go back to using only the built in Mac OS X PDF handling.
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Executive Summary: Acrobat 7 Professional Adobe Acrobat 7 provides a robust set of tools for PDF creation and management. Although lightweight alternatives exist for free in many environments, Acrobat easily justifies its cost for those requiring more than just the basics. ($449 individually or $1,119 as part of Creative Suite 2 Premium, www.adobe.com.) | The Grade |
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