Adobe Acrobat Professional 8 Reviewed

by , 3:00 PM EST, December 28th, 2006

Adobe's Acrobat software has grown from a PDF editor into a complete suite of publishing tools. Gary Coyne at Applelinks published a thorough review of version 8 for Mac OS X and explained in detail all the changes in a review published Sunday.

Even though minor PDF editing is possible with Mac OS X's Preview application, Mac users will want to be aware of the features and changes in Acrobat version 8. Mr. Coyne wrote: "Many years ago, you purchased Acrobat so you could create your own PDF documents. For a number of versions now, Acrobat has been so much more than "just a PDF creator" that it's hard to pin down what it is and/or should be called. I think that Acrobat 8 could be called Office 8, but that would be ignoring all of the print features built into Acrobat."

The review had extensive screen shots and commented on the speed gains made available to Intel Macs. The merging of PDF files, creation of forms, mark up, and tools for specialized print jobs were also covered. A major concern in the review was the more complex PC-like interface that seemed targeted more at business users and fell short in ease of use.

The review gave a three Apple rating out of five and concluded: "There are some very good to excellent feature updates in Acrobat 8, but they are shrouded by an interface that gets in the way more than it welcomes you in."