how to do Reading, writing and er... Acrobat - the 3Rs

Reading, writing and er... Acrobat - the 3Rs

Reading, Writing and Acrobat – The three ‘R’s of document processing

“Can’t you just send it as a PDF…?”

Over the past few years this plaintive cry has been heard increasingly in busy offices worldwide. Yet - perhaps because PDF files are now so familiar - there seems to be considerable confusion about exactly what each of the Adobe PDF products actually does. In this section we provide a simple explanation of what the different Adobe applications do, and help you understand where the various PDF options that appear in your other programs came from.

Why ‘Adobe’ PDF?

Let’s sort out some of the key terms first. The obvious place to start is with PDF itself. PDF stands for Portable Document Format and was invented in the early 1990s by Adobe Systems – hence the term ‘Adobe PDF’. We will consider in detail why PDF has become such a ubiquitous and important technology in other articles, but for now we’ll just deal with the basics.

Documents saved in a proprietary format, such as a Microsoft Word ‘doc’ file, can change appearance when viewed on a different computer – even if the same version of the software is used. At its simplest, the PDF format was designed to ensure that a document would look identical to all who viewed it. Other potential advantages include significantly reduced file size, multi-lingual capabilities, accessibility, searchable text and robust security controls.

We’ve already mentioned our second key term – Adobe. The company is responsible for two key products associated with PDF as well as many other familiar names such as Photoshop, Flash and PostScript printing . It is the two PDF products that we will deal with next.

By the way, avoid potential ridicule from your IT support staff by remembering to pronounce ‘Adobe’ the way it was intended – “ah-doh-bee” (for Star Wars fans, rhymes with “..Kenobi” ...)

Adobe Reader for… reading

The less ‘feature-rich’ of the two products, but still a powerful program in its own right. Adobe Reader was originally a paid-for product, but the company opted to make it available at no cost, as a way of promoting the PDF format worldwide. You may have installed Adobe Reader when prompted by a link on a website – for example when you downloaded HMRC forms - or it may have been installed along with another software company’s product, to provide access to their electronic manuals and guides.

Whilst Adobe Reader contains a full set of features for helping you work with existing PDF content, it cannot ‘create’ PDF files. In order to do that you need to use the second Adobe PDF product – Adobe Acrobat.

Adobe Acrobat – the productive member of the team

Where Adobe Reader concentrates on providing access to existing PDF files, the Acrobat product line allows you to actually create PDF files. In fact, over the coming months you’ll discover that Adobe Acrobat products actually do a whole lot more besides.

There are three main products in the Acrobat family: Acrobat Professional, Acrobat Standard and Acrobat Elements. In any of these applications, choosing ‘File, Print, Adobe PDF’ is as difficult as it gets when you want to convert files to the Adobe PDF format…

Acrobat Professional includes the full range of tools for tasks such as: creating electronic documents; combining diverse PDF pages into a single polished document; collaborating on documents using electronic review and markup tools; and controlling the flow of information by securing PDF documents.

In addition, Acrobat 7.0 Professional comes bundled with a copy of Adobe LiveCycle Designer 7.0 – that’s a powerful interactive forms designer, and deserves a separate article which we’ll be publishing in the near future.

Acrobat Standard contains a reduced subset of the features in the Professional version, and in particular leaves out more powerful features such as form design and the comment-enabling option which allows PDF documents to be reviewed and marked up by recipients who have the free Adobe Reader.

Acrobat Elements is intended as a volume product (100 seat minimum) to provide basic desktop PDF creation tools throughout an organisation.

There are some other members of the Acrobat family which are of interest to specialist groups – the new Acrobat 3D for example, which adds interactive 3D models to PDF documents, or Acrobat Capture for volume conversion of paper documents to searchable PDFs. For larger enterprises, Adobe’s LiveCycle server solutions provide PDF oriented solutions for collaboration, document security and forms processing.

If you thought you knew all about Acrobat and Adobe PDF, it may be time to think again.

For a more detailed listing of the features in each application have a look at the matrix on the Adobe UK site: Adobe UK

So how come I can create PDFs from other applications?

In some cases, for example certain Microsoft Office products, Acrobat installs Adobe PDF conversion technology to enable extra features such as hyperlinks and bookmarks to be carried over to the PDF. It also allows for one-button PDF conversion from this type of product.

In other cases manufacturers may opt to include their own PDF conversion technology in order to provide one-click PDF conversion from within their own applications.

Adobe invented PDF and the company continues to innovate and extend the PDF specification to include new features. However from the outset they opted to allow other hardware and software manufacturers to develop and use their own version of PDF technology. That’s one of the reasons for Adobe PDF being adopted worldwide as the universal format of choice for reliable document exchange.