Mud don't stick to Adobe's Acrobat package

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Product: Adobe Acrobat Professional 8.0
Website: ADOBE
System Requirements: Windows XP SP2 version needs a Pentium 4, a reasonable amount of memory like 512MB, and enough disk space this sort of application needs
Price: Depends on territory. And there's the rub. And the mud.

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MY GOODNESS ME. The last version of Adobe's PDF software I reviewed was Acrobat Pro, which is going back quite a bit. That needed Win 95 or Win NT 3.5 and 8MB of memory, plus you had to have one of those quaint 3.5-inch floppy drives as well, and a 286, a 386, a 486 or a leading edge Pentium.

And that wasn't the first time I'd reviewed Acrobat - I had access to the very first release and sang its praises high at Software Magazine, pre-Pentium and almost pre-486 times. There even used to be a DOS version, for crying out loud.

Naturally, since then, things have changed quite a lot. I was always an advocate of Acrobat, heck, I'm surprised that Adobe hasn't started chortling on about carbon offsets from using PDFs rather than printing paper on expensive HP machines with even more expensive "consumables". But I digress.

I'm pleased to say that my experience reviewing Professional 8.0 matched my early expectations of Adobe products. While it's true that version 8.0 takes up a heck of a lot more space on a hard drive than Acrobat Pro, it's also true that it's got tons more features and doesn't even hiccup when it's faced with files created on the Old Dog. Plus hard drives are cheap as chips, while software is still expensive, comparatively.

You couldn't, for example, in the old days create a PDF from a blank page and type text onto the page using the typewriter bar. Nor could you bung loads of files in different file formats into a single PDF. There's more scanners supported, many more, while you can play around with headers and footers and the like. There are some excellent forms templates using wizards to create the kind of invoices that are more likely to be paid than not. And there's heaps of redaction tools, so if you are Vince Poppiti, the special master presiding over the AMD versus Intel case, you can redact, redact and redact again, confident that when the file goes up on Pacer it can't be un-redacted. Shame that feature.

Compared to the ancient version I'd been using until I got this latest version, the thing is really quite astoundingly good. Let me give you an example. About 10 years ago I'd created many PDFs using Distiller and Pro and the like, which contained embedded fonts but had somehow inexplicably lost the original word processing files I'd used to create them. Professional 8.0 magically re-created them again for me in RTF format, meaning that I could make those edits I'd been dying to for years, and recovering data that was entombed in PDF, I had presumed forever.

The Good
Many many features allow you to play with your PDFs until your heart is content - watermarking, optimising, and the rest. Running the software on a Pentium IIII with 1GB memory is no kind of nightmare - the software is fast and converts things furiously.

Another thing that's good is that Adobe continues to demonstrate its technical excellence over Microsoft. The latter company thought it could wipe out Adobe on many fronts and fonts just 10 years ago, but Adobe continues to, er, excel.

The Bad
The typewriter bar may have been in previous versions of Professional - it sure as heck wasn't in Acrobat Pro all those years ago. It's a finicky tool which is hard to use and surely only necessary when you've reached the desperate stage in PDF production.

The Ugly
The price is ugly. It's much uglier in Europe than it is in the USA. Even given the different rates of value added tax (VAT) that persist in muddling the price minded maven, and even given how strong the £ is against the $, the delta is, like most deltas, muddy.

Conclusion
Yeah, even 12 or more years after, I'm still an Adobe fan. Mud obviously sticks. The company is doing some interesting things in other areas too, and it's been consistently profitable since inception. Although it doesn't have the profile that Google has, its software continues to push at the barriers in this and other areas, and we can't see either the Vole or the Goodie Two Shoes catching up anytime soon. The software would score nine pints if it was priced right. Because of the price of pints, and software, in Europe, we're knocking three whole pints off its score. I love it. What's to hate about it apart from the price?

If your heart stops at the price of the software, you can try it and the Standard Edition out for 30 days for nothing and hope your heart re-starts after that date. ?

Bartender's Report