RECOMMENDED

VERDICT InDesign CS4 boosts productivity, adds advanced long document functionality and enables screen-based publishing via Flash.

InDesign is the central application in Adobe’s publishing vision taking text and images and combining them as multiple page publications ready for output on paper. And now on screen.

RECOMMENDED

VERDICT Adobe builds on its print strengths to take its rich design mission online.

It’s easy to forget these days, but Adobe began life developing software and fonts for imagesetting machines. Things have moved on considerably, but Adobe’s core focus and strength remains in publishing.

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: 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...

Tom Arah looks at the history, problems, solutions and future of designing for the screen.

Previously I looked at the history of desktop publishing (DTP) with its focus on print-based design and output to paper. However the advent of the Apple Mac and of the Graphical User Interface (GUI) into the mainstream of personal computing also heralded the opening up of an entirely new publishing medium and one that is set to become even more important than paper – the computer screen itself.