Adobe Acrobat XI

Adobe Acrobat is so firmly established as the premiere PDF application on the planet, and the PDF format is so firmly established as a worldwide standard that a new version, like Adobe Acrobat XI, may not seem very exciting. In fact, though, Acrobat XI does more to simplify and streamline PDF editing and management than anything I've seen in a long time, and it's an essential?and reasonably priced?upgrade for all serious PDF creators.

Acrobat for the first time makes it almost as easy to edit text and graphics in a PDF as it is in a word-processor, though with significant limitations that I'll get to in a moment. The formerly clumsy process of merging documents into a single PDF now gets a streamlined and powerful interface. New form-editing and document-signing features make it easier than ever to add electronic signatures to documents via computers, tablets, and smartphones. Acrobat XI preserves the simplified interface that Adobe introduced in Acrobat X, but it's learned a lot of smooth new moves.

Which Acrobat?
Acrobat XI comes in two commercial versions, Acrobat XI Pro ($449, upgrade $199) and Acrobat XI Standard ($299, upgrade $139). The Pro version includes features required mostly by enterprise customers and graphics designers: for example, "preflight" operations that customize output for high-quality print and web output and the ability to create PDFs from CAD software and Visio. Both versions should be on sale in mid-October, when the free Adobe Reader XI will also be released.

Enhanced PDF Editing
For anyone who (like me) regularly creates PDF files, the best new feature in Acrobat XI is its completely overhauled and enhanced ability to edit PDF documents. Acrobat always included touch-up features for correcting typing errors or replacing a few words, but the results often looked bad and the whole process felt clumsy.

Now, when you click Edit Text & Images in Acrobat's Content Editing tools, every paragraph in the document appears with an outline around it, and you can simply click inside a paragraph and start typing?or you can run a Find and Replace if you need to change the name of your new product a hundred times in the same document.

As you edit, words wrap correctly at the ends of lines. Formatting icons let you change paragraph alignment, so you can get full justification instead of ragged-right formatting. If you click a plus-sign icon next to the Format item on the editing menu, you get access to detailed typographic controls over kerning and spacing, just as in Adobe's high-end graphics and layout software. You get similar power over images. Right-click on an image and the menu offers options to flip or rotate the image, plus an option to replace the image entirely.

Acrobat and Nitro
When you edit a paragraph, one thing that Acrobat can't do is automatically move other paragraphs on the same page down to make room for text that you added when editing, or up to fill in the space left when you removed text. That's because the PDF format is based on objects with specific positions on a page, unlike a word-processor that lets text flow freely up and down the document. If you need to make edits to a PDF file that cause text to reflow from one page to another, then use Acrobat's massively improved export feature, which saves PDF files to Microsoft Office formats, including, for the first time, PowerPoint presentations, and then save the exported Office document as a new PDF file.

A few months ago, when I reviewed one of Acrobat's many third-party rivals, Nitro PDF, I was impressed that it did a better job than Acrobat X (Acrobat's then-current version) of exporting Microsoft Office documents. With Acrobat XI, Adobe decisively takes back the lead in the quality of exported Office files, but Nitro PDF, however, boasts a feature that automatically generates PDF bookmarks based on document structure, an ability that Acrobat still doesn't match.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/4JJ_zYmJzpM/0,2817,2370981,00.asp

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