Adobe Acrobat 6.0 Professional

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If you haven’t personally received a PDF document from a client or another lawyer, you surely have at least asked someone else to download an official IRS, corporate or court form for use in your practice.

You almost certainly have the latest version of Adobe Reader (formerly Acrobat Reader) installed on your computer, be it running on a Microsoft Windows, Apple Macintosh, Linux, Palm or other Acrobat-compatible operating system. The download is free and Adobe wants you to use it. The easier it is for users to read a PDF file, the greater the need for others to purchase software to create PDF files.

Which brings us to Acrobat, Adobe’s solution to the PDF creation problem and the subject of this week’s column.

Prices and support

Acrobat 6.0 comes in standard and professional versions at $300 and $450, respectively. You can either download the installation files, at 167 or 190 megabytes, or purchase them on a CD. Substantial discounts are, of course, available from the usual sources. A feature comparison between the two versions and Adobe Reader, and a cut-down version called Elements, is provided at store.adobe.com/products/acrobat/pdfs/acrobat6matrix.pdf.

Adobe also offers an upgrade path from earlier versions, $100 for the standard version and $150 for the professional version. This review is based upon the professional version, and some of the features mentioned are not available in the standard version.

Adobe offers installation support on a toll call, but otherwise free basis for 90 days after registration. More extensive, toll-free advice is available for $39 for a single incident, $159 a year for single users to $400 a year for users of multiple programs on a “three user per work site” basis.

Features, new and old

Acrobat’s root function always has been converting data to PDF. You can create a PDF from a word processor or spreadsheet file, from the results of a scan (Acrobat can be set to control the scanner) from a group of files or from a Web page.

As one might expect in this stage of a relatively mature product, the publisher’s features list boasts of a lot of tweaking and many added features that seem to be little more than keeping current with that which is expected of Windows productivity software these days. (Not that there’s anything wrong with keeping up with today’s nominal Windows standards, of course, but there seems to be little real innovation.)

Initiating the PDF-creation process from all sorts of computer files, for example, can be accomplished by choosing a file from a list and initiating a mouse click. (Often, a click of the right mouse button brings up a custom mini-menu that now has “creating a PDF file” as an option.)

It isn’t on the “new features” list, but it is possible to create a PDF file from a Web site by merely listing the URL of the page you want to capture, listing the depth of the site, or even clicking a “capture the entire site” check box. This can take more time and disk space than you have if you choose a really large site, but is very convenient for saving articles and portions of sites important to your research as they existed on the day you did it. As the text on the pages now in PDF format can be searched, this makes it easier to later find the material you need. If you do a lot of Web research, this feature alone might be worth the cost of the product.

I particularly like Acrobat’s tools for collaborative review of PDF documents. Send the document to your review list by e-mail, or e-mail a link to the path or URL of the document to be reviewed. The program permits you to add comments to the document, highlight or “cross out” portions of text, and even has a variety of stamps (three examples are “approved”, “rejected”, or “initial here”), all of which make the collaboration/review process easier. (Of course, you have to convert the document to PDF before you can send it out for the group approval process, but that isn’t hard to do with Acrobat 6 sitting there.)

Review and other Acrobat features can be accessed not only from pulldown menus, but also from small floating tool bars that magically appear when you need them.

I first saw similar collaborative tools in Lotus Development’s WordPro word processor component of its SmartSuite, years ago. (Alas, I know of no one else who ever used SmartSuite, but that’s another story.) And today’s Microsoft Word has similar features.

But Adobe seems to have put a lot of thought into the process, including a “document compare” feature that is useful in reviewing changes between versions. It also includes a method of merging reviewer comments into a master (PDF) copy of the document, as e-mails with comments are returned to the review initiator. If you do a lot of work requiring this sort of collaboration, Acrobat may be just the platform you need to facilitate the process.

I use a lot of PDF forms (mostly as generated by governmental agencies), using Adobe Reader to fill in the blanks, and print the results. If you would like to create such forms for use by others, you’ll need Acrobat; the new version claims easier form-creation procedures, including a special tool bar to facilitate the process.

Finally, although I mostly associate Adobe with PDF, one shouldn’t forget that Adobe has a long history of facilitating precision printing. I have no use for print setups of transparencies, color separations, marks and bleeds — whatever they are — and options for postscript printing. But if your office is involved in preparing documents for professional print shop production, Acrobat is surely a good place to begin.

Acrobat alternatives

There are ways other than Acrobat to create PDF files. Adobe’s subscription service, PDF Online, lets you convert both paper files and computer files to PDF for $10 per month or $100 per year on a subscription basis.

Of course, regular readers know that WordPerfect has long included a “Publish to PDF” facility, and a myriad of PDF printer drivers, from the cost-free PDF995 to the $100 PDF Factory Pro, which can create ordinary PDF files sufficient to satisfy most of your PDF needs.

Any of these will generate PDF files from character-based Windows applications, and those files can be read by any computer user with Adobe Reader or Acrobat itself and are adequate for many law office applications. (They are probably good enough, for example, for generating documents to be filed on bankruptcy court Web sites.) Some will provide digital signatures and encryption and permit you to arrange and rearrange the order of pages within the file. Some will let you tag pages and create an outline from paragraph headings. Some will let you control the degree of compression with which the PDF file is created, and hence the PDF file’s size. (This is particularly applicable with image objects incorporated directly into the PDF.)

But Acrobat 6.0 Professional does all of that and more. If you want to get fancy, for example, adding sound and other multimedia clips, as merely one example, you’ll need Acrobat Pro.

I can’t say that every lawyer needs Acrobat — PDF995 will be fine for many. But many lawyers and every law office will come to a time where one feature of Acrobat or another will be very useful or perhaps critical.
Even if you don’t personally need it, make sure your office isn’t caught short without it.

More PDF info

The Web site www.pdfplanet.com may not have the answer to your pending question, but it does publish a lot of information about PDF and how to get along with Acrobat 6.0 and other PDF products.

The site has an RSS feed so you can “subscribe” with your favorite reader/aggregator to keep track of what is new in PDF and, better yet, tips on how to accomplish various effects in PDF files that you wouldn’t usually think possible. The site may not have what you need on a given day, but if you cannot find it elsewhere, PDFPlanet is a good place to look.

Summary

You may not need most of the features of Acrobat 6.0 Professional most of the time, but the program does a lot and at least one copy should be around the office, just in case.

To learn more about the latest in PDF, check out www.pdfplanet.com.

Barry D. Bayer practices law and writes about computers from his law office in Homewood, Ill. To contact him, write to Law Office Technology Review, P.O. Box 2577, Homewood, IL 60430; call him at (708) 957-3322; or send an e-mail to [email protected]. Specific origin and pricing information about the products discussed in these columns are available at www.lawtechreview.com/details.html.