What Is Acrobat?

Adobe Acrobat and the Portable Document Format ( PDF ) file format that it uses have become the de facto standard for digital document distribution. There have been more than 500 million downloads of the free Adobe Reader software, which lets anyone in the world view and print the contents of PDF files. Because Acrobat is the software that is used to create those PDF files, it has also become enormously popular, beating out Adobe's powerhouse digital image-editing application Photoshop as Adobe's best-selling software program.

KEY TERM

PDF Short for Portable Document Format, a cross-platform file format created by Adobe Systems for sharing files independently of the application that created the file or the operating system of either the file creator or the file viewer.

Adobe Acrobat and the PDF file format offer several significant features: platform-independent document distribution, unmatched document review and annotation, unmatched document security, online form creation and distribution, and online presentation capabilities.

Document Distribution

Cross-platform document distribution is the reason Acrobat and PDF came into existence. Before PDF, reading a document on a Macintosh that was created on a Windows computer (or vice versa) was an exercise in frustration. Even if both users had the same software application on each platform, and the software was supposed to be able to read files created in its sister application (and not all of them did), the fonts, layout, and images often didn't reproduce correctly.

Enter Adobe Acrobat and PDF documents. Suddenly, you could take a PDF document created on a Macintosh computer, view it on a Windows computer, print it on a Linux computer, and see the exact same output each time. Reliable cross-platform document distribution was finally here. And not only was PDF platform-independent, but it was also application-independent. It didn't matter if a document was originally created in Word or Excel or PageMaker or QuarkXpress; once it was converted to a PDF file, anyone could read it with the free Reader software. A designer with Illustrator and PageMaker on a Macintosh being able to create a file that could be viewed and approved by a client who had a Windows system with a suite of business applications was unheard of.

With the growth of the Internet, cross-platform document distribution became online document distribution, and the advantages of PDF made it the perfect file format for just about any file you would want to put on a website. The growth of the Internet turned Acrobat and PDF from a useful utility into the indispensable tool it is today.

Document Review

Another key feature of Acrobat and PDF is collaborative document review. This means a group of reviewers can add comments to a single document on a shared server or via a Web browser, or reviewers can add comments to their own copies of a document and then all the comments can be combined into a single, annotated PDF file.

Using Acrobat in the document review process lets you take advantage of the platform- and application-independent nature of PDF, as well as the wide variety of commenting tools Acrobat offers. For more information on reviewing documents with Acrobat, see 13 About the Review Process and 17 Add Note Comments .

A PDF document with several types of comments.

Document Security

For anyone who works with sensitive data, Acrobat offers some very powerful document security features. Like many applications, Acrobat lets you password-protect documents. However, Acrobat's security is more far more powerful than the password protection offered by most business software programs. In addition to document-level password protection, Acrobat also lets you password-protect specific functionality within the document. You can easily create a document that anyone can view but that only people with the correct password can edit or print.

Acrobat also pioneered secure, digitally signed documents, which enable corporations all over the world to streamline their business operations without compromising the integrity of their documents and business practices. With properly configured digital signatures , PDF forms, proposals, and other types of documents can be approved and processed online with a high level of confidence.

KEY TERM

Digital signatures Blocks of information stored in a file that uniquely identify the person who signed the document.

Online Forms

One of the truly great features of Acrobat is its capability to create online forms. Traditionally, computers didn't help much when it came to reducing the huge amount of day-to-day paperwork that was an inescapable part of doing business. Database programs still required someone to enter the information into the database from a printed form. This allowed a company to keep track of important information, but it didn't make the process any faster or easier.

PDF forms have all the advantages of regular PDF documents but also enable the user to enter data that can either be stored in the document itself or be uploaded to a website for automatic storage in a database. As Acrobat's form features have become better understood and more accessible to the business community, the use of PDF forms in the corporate world has grown by leaps and bounds. Expense reports , time sheets, requisitions, and purchase orders are just some of the everyday forms that can easily be replicated as PDF documents and completed, routed, and archived online.

KEY TERM

PDF forms PDF documents that contain form fields that enable the viewer to enter data directly into the document. PDF forms can also contain interface elements such as buttons , check boxes, and lists the viewer can use to choose from a set of responses.

Online Presentations

A final use for Acrobat is the creation and distribution of online or printed presentations. Acrobat isn't a presentation software program, but it does have a full-screen display mode complete with transition effects. This makes Acrobat or the free Adobe Reader software a perfect vehicle for distributing and delivering reliable, correctly formatted presentations. Because you can create PDFs from any application, you also have more flexibility in how you can choose to create the presentation in the first place. Presentations created in Illustrator or Photoshop can have a polish and sophistication (if you know what you are doing) that you simply can't achieve in a presentation software program. Of course, you can create a PDF from any application and add transition effects, video clips, sound effects and voiceovers , and onscreen buttons in Acrobat for a full-featured presentation with all the formatting reliability and distribution advantages of PDF. For more information on adding multimedia to a PDF, see 33 Create a Multimedia Link .