Software Review of:
Adobe Acrobat 
4.0 

Portable documents are just what they sound like —portable. Let's say that I create a document in Microsoft Word 97. It has tables, graphics, a few fancy fonts and really, really complex formatting. I hand this masterpiece.doc to you on a disk, or send it to you as an e-mail attachment. The trouble starts. You don't have Word97.  You open it in some other word processor and it garbles everything. Maybe the tables don't work, or the graphics are misaligned or all of the bold, italic and paragraph marking are lost. Maybe there are a bunch of nonsense characters at the top and bottom of the document. Or maybe you do have Microsoft Word 97 but I used a fancy font that you don't have installed on your computer and it comes through as plain old Times Roman. It gets even worse if I use a high-end program, such as Adobe PageMaker. If you don't have PageMaker on your system, you're out of luck. Period. 

Maybe, if I'm in a good mood, I'll save this document just for you in Word 95, or WordPerfect, or Lotus, or one of a dozen other file formats. But what if I'm trying to distribute this document to hundreds of people? I've got a life beyond file conversion. Or what if it's my great American novel and I'm sending it off to publishers? It would end up in the recycle bin. Busy people don't mess with file compatibility problems. 

Portable documents are truly portable. It doesn't make any different what program the document was composed in or what programs you have installed on your computer. Fonts don't matter, printers don't matter. It doesn't matter if you are using a Mac or a PC, Linux DOS or OS/2. Nothing matters except that you have the free Acrobat Reader installed on your system. 

Let me make one thing clear. The Acrobat Reader is free. Adobe Acrobat, the program used to make these portable documents, is not free. The suggested retail price is $249, $99 for the upgrade from Acrobat version 3. You can get it directly from Adobe for full price; the street price is about $170. It also comes bundled with the Adobe Design Collection for $1,379 (stop gagging — that's a bargain compared to buying Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop and Acrobat separately.) This program is carried everywhere, but if you can't find it, call Adobe at 800-833-6687. 

Several years ago, I tried to use Acrobat 2.0, without success. The installation process was tricky and I never could get all the bits to work together. Several months ago I got Acrobat 3.0 and thought, "This is the life!" I went on a pdf making binge. I still had a few complaints - maybe I was doing something wrong, but I had to make my pdfs in two steps — first, create a postscript document, and then "distill" it to pdf. Acrobat 4 is a dream. 

I had a little trouble with installation. As recommended by Adobe, I uninstalled Acrobat 3 using the built in uninstaller. I didn't uninstall completely. I had to go on three search-and-destroy missions before I got all of the bits removed. I have several other Adobe products installed and I didn't want to kill Photoshop or PageMaker, so I proceeded cautiously. True to its own PR campaign, Acrobat comes with a skinny installation guide. The big manual is on the disk as a pdf file. My one complaint is that it doesn't have a searchable help index of the type I have grown accustomed to in other Windows programs. 

The new interface for Acrobat 4.0 is slick. Many of my programs, including Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel, now have Acrobat macro icons tucked away in the corner of the screen. After I create my document in its native format, I just click on that Acrobat icon and boom - I'm converting. There are some options. For example, I can elect to save at a resolution optimized for screen viewing, for desktop printing or even for sending to a commercial printer. Microsoft Publisher did not have a separate icon, but I turned a Publisher document into a pdf file by selecting print, and then opting for Adobe PDF Writer as the printer. Some file formats allow you to drag and drop documents into the Acrobat icon on your desktop to start the conversion process. A totally new feature is the ability to grab web pages and import them into Acrobat, just by typing in a URL. I scratched my head over the usefulness of this feature —wouldn't it be more sensible to save the HTML document and all the associated graphics? Then it struck. By converting a web page into pdf, I only have to give a person ONE file -webpage.pdf -- instead of a sloppy bundle of files stored m multiple directories. You can convert just one page, or convert a main page a drill down to all of its sub-levels, or all of the levels but just on the same server. The links remain intact. 

Acrobat 4 also allows you to make changes in the pdf file itself. Before (unless I was missing something) you had to go back to your original document, make the changes there, and re-convert it. You can change text, add and remove pages, crop, rotate, merge several pdf files and even edit graphics using Photoshop. You can add links, either to external web pages (I experimented, and you can even add an e-mail link!) or links within the pdf document itself. You can make it searchable, and include an index. You can embed multimedia files such as Quicktime movies or sound files. 

The collaborative tools are outstanding. At COMDEX, the Adobe representative told us that Acrobat had been designed to military specifications, so you can sign your documents with a 128-bit encryption key to ensure that they are not tampered with. You can also set different permission levels. For example, you can allow people to view but not print your documents, or forbid others from saving a file. 

The annotation tools are awesome. You can add notes — either textual ones or audio notes that you dictate into a microphone. You can highlight, mark through and apply rubber stamps that say everything from "top secret" to "approved." You can use a highlighter, circle things with a "pen" and type nasty comments right on the document. You can even attach another file. 

I spent a great deal of my army career coordinating documents. In Recruiting Command, I wrote regulations governing army advertising. In Washington and Germany I wrote contingency plans for everything from the death of the president to the deployment to Sarajevo. I wish I had Acrobat then! I had to run off dozens of copies, mail them all over the world, and then wait for the responses. When I had amassed a 12-foot high stack of paper, I had to go through them page by page. Using Acrobat, I would have e-mailed the Acrobat document to everyone. They would then pull it into their copies of the program and annotate it. They would e-mail their annotated copies back to me, and then I could import everyone's annotations into a master document. I would print out a consolidated list of annotations. Each note would be identified with the name of the person who made it. This would have saved me hundreds of hours and about three nervous breakdowns. 

Another cool tool is the ability to make portable forms. You can design a form that has fill-in-the blank text blocks, check boxes, radio buttons — the whole shebang. You can then e-mail the form to someone (or include it on a disk or web site), have them fill it out right within their Acrobat Reader. When they send it back you can import the data into a database. 

A new utility is the ability to compare documents — open up two documents, click on compare and it will find all of the differences. Great feature when you have more than one copy of a file floating around! 

As an added bonus, Acrobat files are much smaller that files in their native format. I have one manual I sometimes use —  Net Promotions —  that is 427 KB in PageMaker but only 97 KB in Acrobat. And, as I've explained, anyone can read the Acrobat file, while only those who sprung $499 for the PageMaker program can read the PageMaker one. It is also cheaper to distribute Acrobat files. It costs me about 90 cents to photocopy this manual. It's about a dollar to photocopy my jumpstart web design manual. I can fit both of these in Acrobat format on a floppy disk for a net cost of about a quarter. If I have to mail the manuals, postage is another buck and a day or two delay. I can e-mail the pdf files for free and deliver them in a minute or two. In the pdf I can use color, include web links — and come up with a much slicker document. All around, an excellent solution! 

Am I in love with Acrobat? Yes!! If you routinely share intricately formatted files with a number of people, Acrobat is a necessity. It can be used to exchange marketing materials, such as catalogs and brochures. As I've described, it can be used as a powerful collaborative working tool. It can be used on the web and in e-mail to exchange documents. It can save hours of time that you now waste converting files to other formats, including HTML. As the IRS has found, pdf files look exactly like the originals, so forms can be downloaded and ultimately read with an OCR reader. 

Adobe has come up with a winner here. Get it!