VERDICT With its incorporation of Flash-based media handling and new integration with Acrobat.com, the Acrobat platform fully embraces the internet age – at last.
Adobe Acrobat made its public debut back in 1991 and the PDF (Portable Document Format) it introduced was intended to become the universal format for design-rich, cross-platform electronic communication. The launch of the World Wide Web in the same year forced Adobe to radically revise its plans, but the Acrobat platform survived and eventually prospered by making itself indispensable to a whole host of workflows: documentation distribution, forms handling, secure exchange, searchable archiving, document review, commercial print and so on.

VERDICT A wide range of PDF handling power at a fraction of the cost of Adobe Acrobat.
With its ability to create a fixed electronic representation of the printed page, Adobe’s PDF (Portable Document Format) is one of the most important file formats around acting as the standard medium for a whole host of tasks – document exchange, collaboration and review, print production, form handling, archiving and so on. Adobe would naturally like you to use its own Acrobat applications to take full advantage of the format, but there is an alternative: Nuance’s PDF Converter Professional.

VERDICT A wide range of PDF handling power at a fraction of the cost of Adobe Acrobat.
With its ability to create a fixed electronic representation of the printed page, Adobe’s PDF (Portable Document Format) is one of the most important file formats around acting as the standard medium for a whole host of tasks – document exchange, collaboration and review, print production, form handling, archiving and so on. Adobe would naturally like you to use its own Acrobat applications to take full advantage of the format, but there is an alternative: Nuance’s PDF Converter Professional.

VERDICT: A modern cross-media technical publishing solution – that at its centre is old-fashioned and in need of a major overhaul.

We live in a fast-changing, global, consumer society and just about every product, and minor product variation, needs to come with its own technical documentation...

An enhanced interface and support for Framemaker and multiple languages help give RoboHelp a new lease of life.

At one time producing online help was generally treated as an afterthought to the software development process and usually knocked up in Word using a few macros and Microsoft’s free compiler...

VERDICT: Improved handling of single-source repurposing and new support for rich media and Unicode – but Framemaker is still crying out for a core overhaul.

Framemaker was one of the first DTP packages and this year celebrates its 21st birthday...

RECOMMENDED

VERDICT: New effects enable richer design results while a host of other improvements boost productivity.

By combining photos from Photoshop and illustrations from Illustrator with its own text, layout, formatting and output strengths, InDesign CS3 stands out as the central application in Adobe’s vision of the modern publishing workflow. It also stands out because it is the only one of the three main CS3 design applications that faces any serious competition.

RECOMMENDED

VERDICT: Powerful and award-winning new versions of InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator – and now Acrobat 8 Professional too.

So here they are – the new professional platforms for both print and web design have arrived...

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...

VERDICT With its enhanced interface, support for transparency and new collaboration features, QuarkXPress 7.0 is the best release in years.

At one time QuarkXPress had the world of high-end publishing virtually to itself. However, those days are long gone.