Adobe Acrobat 9 Standard

Most designers use Adobe Acrobat to send magazine articles, news, fillable
forms and other such docs through mail. This helps to publish these docs on the
Web without any loss of information or style. Adobe has recently launched
Acrobat 9 Standard with a lot more features and modifications. You can say it
creates a print-ready document format instead of Portable Document Format as the
PDF is generated at up to 600 dpi resolution. Another great feature is that this
version lets you incorporate multimedia within a PDF. So, you can watch a video
clip within the PDF. You can open a PDF file like a web page and click on the
multimedia item to play. This starts the embedded Flash movie, without requiring
you to install or open any movie player like Windows Media Player or VLC Media
Player.

Other features of the software include capturing web pages containing Flash
movies to make PDF formats for printing or sharing PDFs using the Web capture
facility. The PDF files are clear and sharper than before because the new
version supports scanning as well as Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
technology. When you scan a page in the earlier versions of Acrobat, they only
create an image of that page. There is no provision for text modification.
Acrobat 9 allows you to scan an image containing text and creates a PDF, where
you can edit text. The OCR technology eases the task of searching the desired
sentence or words. Similarly, it is easy to convert a PDF file to Word without
any change in formatting.

The new Form Wizard makes Word or Excel documents into PDF forms very quickly
and easily. These PDF forms can be used to fill in details electronically using
Adobe Reader. The Form Wizard creates forms from paper or electronic documents.
The Form Tracker will monitor the people who've filled a particular form and and
collect data electronically. After all forms are complete, you can easily export
the data to a spreadsheet for future reference.

Upgrading from Acrobat Standard version 8 to version 9 costs only $99. So,
this new version is best for existing users. They can include multimedia files
of their important meetings and seminars within a PDF file and send them to
different regional offices. This will cut traveling costs for meetings. It is
possible for viewers to put a note on the video as well. As the PDF document is
of high quality, ISO standard PDF/A setting, it can archived for longer periods
of time. As mentioned earlier, PDF/A setting (up to 600 dpi) is good for quality
printing also. You can also store and share these PDF files with anyone,
anywhere using Acrobat.com services.

The PDF of pcquest.com home page. The items encircled in red are animations from the Web page that play on the PDF as well. This constitutes the new Web Capture feature.

Bottomline: Adobe has included Web pages as part of the
mix that can be converted to print-ready PDFs by enabling embedded video and
animation. The overall ease of use is also enhanced.