Adobe Acrobat Exchange 2.1 for Windows

a software review by Pete Cassetta, Alamo PC

Acrobat Exchange lets you create and modify electronic documents that use Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF). Exchange retails for about $130, and is just one member of Adobe's Acrobat family of products. Other members include the Acrobat Reader, Acrobat Pro, Acrobat Search, and Acrobat for Workgroups.

An Overview of Acrobat

Adobe has positioned Acrobat as an industry standard for working with portable electronic documents. "Portable" means that the documents can be viewed and printed under all mainstream operating systems. The program used to browse and print PDF documents is called Acrobat Reader, and it is available for free from Adobe's Web site. Copies of Acrobat reader were distributed on CD at the October Alamo PC meeting, so you may already have one. Reader is currently available for the Mac OS, DOS, Windows, and Unix. OS/2 and Windows NT are conspicuously absent from this list, though the Windows Reader runs under both.
Acrobat is a powerful alternative to the ad-hoc solutions that are often used for distributing electronic documents. Perhaps the most common approach is simply to use a word processor format, such as WordPerfect 5.1. While this works great when the person receiving your document has the same word processor, printer, and fonts, it can be problematic otherwise. Another common solution is to put the information into a Windows or OS/2 help file. One nice advantage of this approach is that you can create an index and hyperlinks to facilitate on-screen viewing of the document. The downside is that you have a limited range of formatting options, and only people that use the same operating system as you can read the document. Lately, HTML (the language used to format documents on the World-Wide Web) has become quite popular. It is probably the most portable solution of all, as HTML viewers (i.e. Web browsers) are available for all popular operating systems. HTML also allows for flexible hyperlinks. The downside of HTML is that only limited formatting options are available, and there's no way to ensure that your documents will look the same on different HTML viewers.

Acrobat has advantages over all these approaches. Its hyperlink and search facilities are very powerful, and you get complete control over formatting. PDF documents can be as complex as you like, and they will view and print identically on all supported platforms. A recent interesting development is that PDF and HTML are becoming more closely related. PDF documents can now contain hyperlinks to Web sites, and future versions of Netscape Navigator will license Acrobat technology, enabling you to view both PDF and HTML documents on Web sites.

Features

Acrobat Exchange has two main components: PDF Writer and Exchange. Also included is Adobe Type Manager, Acrobat Reader, and a powerful Search program that lets you search PDF files which have been indexed using Acrobat Catalog. A thin "Getting Started" guide is the only printed documentation, but a full user's guide is included in PDF form.
PDF Writer is basically a Windows printer driver. To create a PDF file, you simply print your document to the PDF Writer instead of to a printer. It's that simple! This is much easier than creating a help file or HTML document. The resulting PDF file can be viewed and printed on any supported platform. If you wish to facilitate on-screen viewing, however, you'll need to spice up the document using Exchange.

Several options can be specified with PDF Writer. When printing, a dialog box pops up that lets you specify a title, subject, and author for the document, as well as keywords. Other options may be specified via the standard Print Setup dialog box. PDF files are compressed, and a Print Setup option lets you fine-tune the compression. A Font option lets you specify which fonts, if any, should be embedded in the PDF file. Embedding fonts greatly increases the file size, but it is necessary if your document uses unusual fonts that readers are unlikely to have on their machines (e.g. a Turkish font). You generally don't need to embed fonts, because Acrobat Reader is very flexible and intelligent about substituting appropriate fonts. Reader even comes with two multiple master fonts (one with serifs, one sans-serif) that can be scaled in both height and width to match the characteristics of any fonts you've used in your document.

The Exchange program does everything Acrobat Reader does, and it also lets you modify PDF files. In fact, if you have Exchange, there's no need to install Reader at all.

Exchange lets you modify a PDF file in the following ways: you can annotate it, add bookmarks and hyperlinks, move or delete pages, insert pages from another PDF file, and password protect various aspects of the file (such as whether it can be printed or modified).

A Hands On Test

To run Exchange through its paces, I created a PDF version of the User's Guide for a product of mine called 3-D Keyboard. The User's Guide is 40 pages long, and it was created with Ami Pro 3.0. It is formatted for output on a PostScript printer, and uses various sizes and styles of two fonts: CG Omega (a TrueType font used for headings) and Palatino (a PostScript font used for text).

My first step was to select PDF Writer as my printer driver. This immediately caused Ami Pro (and all of Windows, in fact) to crash. After some experimenting, I discovered that the culprit was the Palatino font. This font is resident in all PostScript printers, and I didn't have a Type 1 equivalent installed for use on-screen or in other types of printers. I was surprised that the whole system would crash over this; after all, Acrobat should be able to substitute fonts just fine.

But rather than dwell on this curiosity, I turned my attention to finding a workaround. I found two: I could either install a Type 1 Palatino font in Adobe Type Manager, or change my document to use some font other than Palatino. I first tried installing a Palatino font. This seemed to work fine, until I tested my PDF document with neither the CG Omega or Palatino fonts installed. Many potential readers of the document won't have these fonts, so I was curious to see how well Acrobat would substitute fonts. Using its multiple master fonts, it actually did quite nicely on-screen and when printing on a non-PostScript printer. However, it didn't print correctly to PostScript printers, so in the end I just changed my document to use very common and basic fonts: Arial and Times New Roman.

Another problem I encountered is that one page which had several large graphics had to be printed to the PDF Writer by itself. If I tried to print the entire document, the print job would abort halfway through this page with no indication that an error had occurred. This was curious, but wasn't really a problem since Exchange can merge several PDF documents into a larger one.

My final step was to add bookmarks and hyperlinks to facilitate on-screen viewing. Bookmarks are basically a table of contents, and they are viewed in a separate window beside your main document window (see Figure 2). You can use multiple levels of bookmarks to create a collapsible outline view of the document. This is what I did, mirroring the Table of Contents for my User's Guide.

Hyperlinks are always tedious and time-consuming to create, and I spent several hours creating the 200 or so hyperlinks for this User's Guide. To its credit, Acrobat has a number of features which streamline the process and make it much easier than the corresponding process I've gone through in creating help systems and HTML documents. I was especially impressed by its ability to link to Web addreses. I created hyperlinks for my e-mail address and Web page, and they both work great.

Users are accustomed to seeing hyperlinks underlined and in a different color (both Windows help and most Web browsers show them this way). Acrobat instead displays hyperlinks by drawing a rectangle around the text. I wish there were an option to use underlining and/or color. Since there is not, I decided to modify my document, changing all the text that I would hyperlink to blue (this was quite tedious). I then turned off the rectangle display so that hyperlinks would appear to the user as blue text. I didn't use underlining because I didn't want underlines to appear when printed (blue text doesn't print much differently than black text on a monochrome printer, so the hyperlinks aren't too visible).

Before adding hyperlinks, my PDF file was about 144 KB. With hyperlinks, it was about 188 KB. This isn't bad, considering that the Ami Pro file it was created from was over 600 KB. If you would like to see the finished product, you can download it from my Web page (http://www.connecti.com/~ftsoft/), which also has a link to Adobe's site for downloading the Acrobat Reader.

Conclusions

Acrobat Exchange (and Reader) are more enjoyable on a loaded computer; scrolling is rather slow otherwise. System requirements are a 386 processor with 4 MB of RAM, but I recommend at least a fast 486 with 16 MB of memory and a large screen.

Acrobat is a very effective portable document solution which is quickly becoming an industry standard. Exchange still has some rough edges, but I was able to find workarounds for each problem I encountered. If you want an easy way to create nicely formatted electronic documents, Acrobat is a great choice.