Adobe Systems made public Acrobat 9.0 this week – calling the latest iteration a means of ‘redefining PDF communications’. Pity that didn’t translate into less bloat.

Adobe first introduced the Portable Document Format (PDF) to the masses, touting it as simple way of compressing and sharing documents. The latest version introduces a lot of ‘flash’ – literally by allowing Flash-embedding as well as a presentation plugin for Microsoft’s Power Point. Now, instead of death by Power Point we can expect PDF casualties in future. Thankfully the feature is only available in the Pro Extended version.

On the outside, the extra features that Acrobat comes with may sound attractive – if you fancy PDF documents that sing, dance and do the cha-cha. The Adobe PDF Portfolios allows users to mix-and-mesh various media formats – video, audio, 3D objects all into one PDF file.

Acrobat 9 also allows real-time web collaboration and sharing of documents as well as a rather controversial feature – saving entire Web sites in PDF. The latter might get website owners in a tizzy over copyrighted content.

The new Acrobat 9 family has three versions – Acrobat 9 Standard, Acrobat 9 Pro, and Acrobat 9 Pro Extended priced at US$299, US$449 and US$669, with discounts available for upgrade versions. For more information, the Adobe Acrobat site is at www.adobe.com/acrobat.

Also newly launched is Acrobat.com, the beta version of Adobe’s hosted services, allowing users to create and store PDF documents online among other features.

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Entry was posted on Thursday, June 5th, 2008 at 11:47 am under Software.

Read more entries by Erna Mahyuni.
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