The Acrobat Product Family

The Acrobat product family consists of several related products. These range from the free Adobe Reader software to the powerful, full-featured Professional version of Adobe Acrobat.

Reader

Most computer users are familiar with the free Adobe Reader software, formerly called Adobe Acrobat Reader. Unfortunately, many users have long been confused about the difference between Acrobat Reader and Acrobat itself, assuming that they had the full version of Acrobat on their computers just because they were able to view PDF files. This is one reason Adobe has renamed the Adobe Acrobat Reader to simply Adobe Reader. Another reason is that Reader lets you view or read more than just Acrobat PDF files. It also contains the functionality formerly found in Adobe eBook Reader, so Reader is now both a PDF and eBook viewing application. Adobe Reader 7.0 is available for free download from Adobe's website at www.adobe.com/reader. It can also be found on many software installation CDs because software manuals and read me files are often distributed in PDF format.

With the free Reader 7.0 software, you can

• View eBooks

• Open PDFs

• Print PDFs

• Complete and submit specially prepared PDF forms

• Add basic comments to specially prepared PDFs

Acrobat Standard

Acrobat Standard is the more basic of the two versions of Acrobat. It is intended for people who need to create and edit PDFs, but who don't need all the features of Acrobat Professional. The Standard version is a good solution for most individual and small business needs.

With Acrobat 7.0 Standard, you can

• Open PDFs

• Print PDFs

• Create, combine, and edit PDFs

• Add comments to PDFs

Acrobat Professional

Acrobat Professional is the most full-featured of all the Acrobat products. It is intended for commercial print shops , web and graphic designers, IT professionals, documentation specialists, and anyone else who needs full control over PDF creation and editing. The two main features of Acrobat Professional that the Standard version lacks are form creation and preflighting . Form creation is becoming an industry of its own, with PDF forms becoming more and more popular.

KEY TERM

Preflighting The process of checking a document for potential printing problems. It is most often used when preparing a document that will be sent to a commercial printing facility. Preflighting has traditionally required the use of third-party solutions.

With Acrobat 7.0 Professional, you can

• Open PDFs

• Print PDFs

• Create, combine, and edit PDFs

• Add comments to PDFs

• Add form features to PDFs

• Work with layers

• Preflight documents for commercial output

Adobe Designer

One of the biggest new features of Acrobat 7.0 is the introduction of Adobe Designer. Adobe Designer is a standalone form creation application. For the first time ever, you can create your PDF forms from the ground up in a PDF environment. Previously, you had to create the layout of your form in a separate application, such as Illustrator or InDesign; convert the document to PDF; and then add form elements such as text field, check boxes, and drop-down lists in Acrobat.

Designer ships with Acrobat Professional, or it can be purchased separately. Designer is not currently available for Mac OS. If you are a Mac user , you have to create forms the old-fashioned way with Acrobat.

With Acrobat Designer 7.0, you can design PDF forms from scratch, from provided templates, or using a form design wizard.

The Adobe Designer interface.

Acrobat Distiller

Even though Acrobat Distiller is not a "product" in the traditional sense (you cannot purchase it separately), it is a standalone application that is a critical part of Acrobat. It is installed automatically with both Acrobat Standard and Acrobat Professional. Distiller is the application that actually converts documents to the PDF format. Whether you print to PDF, use the PDFMaker buttons in Microsoft Office, or create a PDF from within Acrobat, the document data is sent to Distiller and Distiller creates the finished PDF version. Distiller runs in the background, out of sight, which is why most Acrobat users are unaware of Distiller's importance.

KEY TERM

Distiller It performs the actual converion of a document into a PDF file.

NOTE

One other product in the Acrobat family is Acrobat Elements. Acrobat Elements is a slightly less full-featured version of Acrobat Standard designed for large companies that want to standardize on PDF for their document distribution, review, and archival needs. It is available only as a large-scale enterprise solution, meaning it is not available for retail purchase to individuals.

For the most part, you won't need to know much more than that about Distiller. Most documents convert to PDF using Distiller's standard settings with no problem. However, you can create better-quality output and smaller file sizes in certain circumstances by changing Distiller's conversion settings. See 77 About Acrobat Distiller for more information about working with Distiller.