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.