Most computer users are familiar with files read by Adobe Acrobat Reader. This is a necessary program for opening and reading PDF (Portable Document Format) files. Many people, however, do not know of Adobe Acrobat which is a suite of programs used to create, convert and edit PDF files as well as to capture text from scanned documents and index already created PDF documents.
The system requirements for Acrobat 4 for windows are: Win 95/98 or NT 4 with service pack 3 or later; a 486 or Pentium processor with Pentium as a recommended choice; 16 MB of RAM for Windows 95/98 or 24 MB of RAM for NT 4 with 32 recommended; 32 MB of RAM for the Paper Capture plug-in with 64 recommended; 75 MB of available hard-disk space with 50 more for Asian Fonts; and a CD-Rom Drive.
Adobe Acrobat 4 comes with a small Getting Started guide and an extensive online manual which can be accessed online or printed from the CD-Rom. Also included on the CD-Rom are: Acrobat Reader 4, list of vendors for digital signatures, PostScript drivers and other utilities, an online tour, etc.
The program retails for a street price of $230 for first time buyers and an upgrade price of $99.00. The full version of Capture 2.0.1 is $600. However Acrobat 4 does have a capture module component already present. For a more detailed differentiation of features see the products section of the Adobe website of www.adobe.com.
For those familiar with Acrobat 3, some of the new features to be found in 4 are: Microsoft Office Integration, automatic output options for creating PDF for professional printing presses, local network printers, or specifically for the web; drag and drop PDF creation; html capture right off of a website, copy and paste capabilities; digital signatures; batch processing; document comparisons, and more.
When I first installed Acrobat 4, I wondered if some of the modules were missing. Acrobat 4 has a new face. It does not have an exchange or capture module. They are, instead, in the new module called Acrobat. In addition, the Distiller Assistant does not appear on the task bar nor does it need to.
One of the nicest features that I discovered was the ability to open a web file as a PDF and then excerpt information from it. This information can be transferred to any program. For example. I opened the file: http://www.adobe.com/prodindex/acrobat/main.html and saved it as a PDF. On my screen this PDF looked identical to the html version. I then copied some information from it and inserted it in this text. The insertion is below: To accomplish this, I used the Column Selector Tool
I also copied this box from the same web page and executed a simple Copy/Paste command.
Installation was easy as is maneuvering through the program's various modules once the differences between Acrobat 3 and 4 are realized.
As new Adobe products are conceived or updated, their interfaces keep getting more and more uniform; thus it is very easy to go from one program to another. In addition, plugins for existing programs, for example, are created. If Acrobat 4 is installed after Photoshop 5 on a machine, a PDF plug-in is automatically supplied. This enables a user to take an image from a PDF, modify it in Photoshop, and return it to the PDF document. If Photoshop 5 is installed after Acrobat 4, the Getting Started guide discusses how to configure Photoshop 5 manually.
Distilling a file is a snap. To test it out, I took two file from the current version of Microsoft Word and created one PDF without jpegs and one with jpegs. Both looked great when finished. Next I saved a Photoshop 5 psd file as a PDF and then opened it successfully in Acrobat Reader. Once again, the distilling process worked very well. Finally, I saved this same file as an eps, exited Photoshop and converted it directly in distiller. All three images are included in the article to be found on the TCS web site of www.tcs.org/ioport. The file name is acrobat4.jpg
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