VERDICT: A questionable interface redesign, greater-than-ever complexity and a general half-baked feeling.

Acrobat’s great strength is its multi-purpose flexibility but this leads to its great weakness – complexity. With Acrobat 8 Professional, Adobe finally attempts to tackle the problem...

To begin with, the overall interface has been redesigned with a more modern Vista feel and more space devoted to Acrobat’s main job – displaying documents. However some of the new icons are inscrutable and there are still no less than 15 toolbars to choose from offering a bizarre mix of icon and dropdown commands. This is certainly not a radical Office 2007-style reworking and Acrobat remains over complicated and unnecessarily intimidating.
At least Adobe recognizes that it needs to focus on the key areas of PDF functionality. The new Getting Started panel helps, dividing the program’s capabilities into eight main categories - Create PDF, Combine Files, Export, Start Meeting, Secure, Sign, Forms and Review & Comment – which also form the basis for the redesigned main toolbar. It’s a start but Adobe just can’t stop itself - click through on one of the options and you are immediately bombarded with explanatory text, graphics, commands and links.

Adobe has made some attempts to rationalize and simplify the interface

Acrobat 8’s new functionality also falls into these eight major categories. When it comes to creating PDFs, for example, there are new options for directly converting AutoCAD files, for optimizing scanned documents and for creating PDFs from scratch (in other words the already bloated Acrobat Professional can now also act as a word processor!). More usefully, the integration with office applications has been extended with support for automatic archiving of email messages in Outlook and Lotus Notes, extended support for Excel and PowerPoint (the latter including Speakers notes and Action buttons) and the ability to convert Word mail merges to PDFs.
Acrobat 8 Professional also rethinks the way that multiple PDFs can be combined with a new central dialog, the ability to save header and footer presets and support for Bates numbering. More importantly, Acrobat 8 now lets you combine files that still remain separate. The resulting “PDF packages” offer a number of advantages: a new navigation panel lists all component files; you can search the current, selected or all documents (and a new floating results window and the ability to embed indexes should make searching faster); you can also print entire documents or just selected components (and you can now print longer documents as double-sided booklets though the imposition power is disappointingly basic); and finally you can incorporate native file formats not just PDFs. Disappointingly though, backwards compatibility is awkward meaning that the end user really needs the latest Adobe Reader 8 (a massive download of over 20MB!) to handle PDF packages, so it’s currently sensible to hold off – especially as there are a number of bugs still to iron out, for example when it comes to global searching.

new Acrobat 8 Professional features include support for redaction and PDF packages

In terms of Security, the new Examine Document command lets you see and remove hidden content, such as metadata, bookmarks and annotations. There’s also a new Redaction toolbar that lets you mark up elements to be permanently removed from the PDF – you can even search for sensitive text and mark it for removal though the whole process is unnecessarily convoluted. If you’re signing off your document there’s a new Preview mode that suppresses dynamic content that might otherwise change and support for a new system of roaming IDs. For the author there’s the ability to set seed values to control what choices the user can make when signing and, crucially, the option to enable signing capabilities for users of Adobe Reader 7 and later.
For form handling a new version of the separate, dedicated (and horrendously complicated) LiveCycle Designer is included. This now lets you import an existing PDF as a background over which you can add form fields either automatically or manually, or you can use preset form templates. You can also now manage the distribution of forms while the existing Review Tracker dialog lets you keep a record of the forms you have filled in yourself (bizarrely it also now acts as a RSS feed reader!). And again you can now enable Adobe Reader 7 and later users to not just sign a form but also save their own copy.
For commenting and reviewing, Acrobat 8 Professional sees the previously separate toolbars combined and now highlights selected comments when zoomed out (though not enough). Otherwise the main focus is on shared, web-hosted reviews which allow all comments to be centrally pooled and viewed as they are added. Such shared review doesn’t require any server software, comments are automatically retrieved and users notified, and again users of the free Reader program can now be enabled to join in.
If you want to go a stage further and collaborate on a document in real-time then click on the new Start Meeting command. Expectations were high around this integration between PDF and Flash - but don’t get too excited. In practice there is no real integration – you’re essentially just using Acrobat as a route to loading your own dedicated Acrobat Connect (formerly Breeze) meeting space URL. To arrange meetings of over 15 people you’ll have to buy a license immediately but otherwise you can start a free trial account. Or rather you could do if this wasn’t only available in North America!
This is the last straw. As it stands, apart from the ability to extend digital signing, form handling and shared review to users of the free Adobe Reader, there are no compelling reasons to upgrade. Worse, many of the new features and interface changes actually end up adding to the program’s existing bloat and over-complexity. To top it all, the online help is a work in progress and the program is buggy. It’s extraordinary that Adobe signed off the program in a state like this and Acrobat 8 Professional certainly doesn’t live up to its name.
Tom Arah

EASE OF USE 2/6
FEATURES 5/6
VALUE FOR MONEY 3/6
OVERALL 3/6