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Acrobat is probably the premier tool for creating documents in a Portable Document Format (PDF). This allows a file to be opened on a different computer, possibly with different software or even a different operating system, and the file will appear consistently throughout. This simplifies distribution of data such as charts, reports, and memos to many people, especially where editing capability is not needed or desired, and visual consistency is required.

I have not used Acrobat Pro before, so this review will be somewhat skewed as I have no past experience to compare this software against. It will also be brief as I am still exploring the software. So I will be showing more of my first impressions rather than a thorough analysis.

I’ll start with a couple of details I had not realized before I started using this software. First, despite the name, Acrobat is not the same as Acrobat Reader. Reader is just that - a reader of PDF files. The full Acrobat package, on the other hand, can read and create PDFs. Second item is that Acrobat and PDF are not tied together - PDF is an open document standard, whereas Acrobat is software from Adobe to read and write PDF files. Apparently, anyone with the means and know-how can create their own PDF reader/writer based on the PDF standard.

Interface

The Acrobat interface is quite different from any of the other CS3 products. This is probably because it is developed primarily as a separate boxed product, although it is included in the higher-end suite packages (e.g. Web Premium, Design Premium). So it takes a little adjusting when switching back and forth with the other CS3 components.

That said, the interface is fairly intuitive and easy to work with.

Creating PDFs - Acrobat

When you first start the program, you are greeted with a welcome screen, as the image shows. You can check the box in the upper right corner to prevent the welcome screen appearing on startup, if you prefer.

The welcome screen is useful to get started on something quickly after startup. The buttons seem to represent groupings of related functionality; clicking a button changes the welcome screen to show the related functionality for the group that the button represents. On any one of these screens, you can click the Home button in the upper left corner to return to the main welcome screen. Below is an image of what appears after clicking the Create PDF button.

You can work out of Acrobat using this technique, or you can close the window to work directly in Acrobat (my preferred choice). The main Acrobat window has a toolbar across the top showing the same main sections as displayed on the welcome screen.

Clicking the arrow beside one of the buttons shows, in a dropdown list, the same entries that were displayed on the subpages of the welcome screen. Also, each dropdown has as the last item a Getting Started with… item that shows the matching subpage of the welcome screen when clicked. The Create PDF dropdown is shown below.

To create a PDF from a single existing document, just choose Create PDF->From File…Select a file, and click OK. That’s all there is to it!

The Create PDF has some other interesting entries, described thusly:

From Multiple Files…

This is a useful one if you have multiple files to combine into one PDF. It is actually the same as the Combine Files item on the toolbar. The dialog allows you to pick and choose your files - you can even chose at the directory level, so all files within the directory will be included. You can move selected files up and down, to control their order of appearance within the final document. You can also remove currently selected files.

From Web Page…

Shows a dialog prompting for the web page to convert to PDF, and presents some options. Generally the defaults are fine. Options include grabbing the whole site into a PDF (probably not a good idea except for small sites) and getting the site a specified number of levels below the specified URL.

From Scanner…

You can bring a document from a scanner directly into Acrobat. The dialog asks for a scanner to use, whether to create a new PDF or add to an existing one, and a number of other options. It seems pretty straightforward to use.

From Clipboard Image

This is only enabled when an image has been copied to the clipboard. In that case, selecting this option will immediately create a PDF document containing the image, with no other prompting. Nice and easy.

Creating PDFs - Other Programs

When Acrobat is installed, it adds little toolbars to commonly used programs, including Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer, Visio, and more. So when viewing a web page, or an Office document, you can use the toolbar to create a PDF right then and there. The Internet Explorer button, with dropdown menu, is shown below.

Just have a page or document open, click the PDF button, follow the prompt, and a matching PDF document is immediately generated. This can be very useful when preparing a document that needs to be put into a PDF and then distributed. This is pretty basic usage, but if you need more control, you can use the full Acrobat program.

There is another convenient way to create PDFs from programs other than Acrobat itself. When installed, Acrobat adds an “Adobe PDF” entry to your printers list. So in pretty much any program with a print feature, you can choose the Adobe PDF printer, which will convert the current file to a PDF, without even opening Acrobat! This is a very convenient feature, even more so than the one mentioned above

When using the Adobe PDF printer, you can click the Properties button in the print dialog to set some options before generating the PDF. There are not too many options there, but they do provide some flexibility.

Conclusion

For creating PDFs, Acrobat itself seems to be easy to use. The Create PDF and Combine Files features are probably the most-used, and are indeed easy to use.

If you have the preference to output PDF from other programs, the Adobe PDF printer becomes useful here. Any application that has print capability can be told to send the document to the Adobe PDF printer, which will create the PDF without even needing to open Acrobat. I think I will get a lot of use out of this.

I only scratched the surface of Acrobat in this review, since all I currently need to use is the PDF creation feature. I didn’t even cover the Export, Start Meeting, Secure, Sign, Forms, and Review & Comment features. I have not had a use for these features to this point, and do not have anything else to say about them. That may well change in the future.