Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF) has been almost too successful. The defining moment was perhaps when Microsoft announced a free PDF export add-on for Office 2007, a feature OpenOffice has had for years. Now that both creating and viewing PDF documents is convenient and free, what market is there for Adobe's official authoring product, Acrobat 9?

Adobe's answer is to emphasise features that go beyond simply capturing the content and layout of a document in a portable format. Acrobat 9 introduces three key features: native Flash support lets you embed multimedia content without depending on external media players; portfolios let you create sophisticated multi-document presentations; and links to Acrobat.com, a hosted document management site, offer collaboration without the pain of email attachments.

I suffered a few glitches during my review. I tried to embed an MPEG 2 video, which is meant to convert it to Flash format, but although no error was reported the import failed. It worked fine when I converted the file to H.264 using an external editor. I also got a "no response from the server" error when trying to upload a large PDF to Acrobat.com, although this worked well with smaller files. The progress bar when uploading did not work properly for me; it goes to 100 per cent almost immediately, then states "Not responding" until the upload is done.

Using scanner features caused Acrobat 9 to crash, which is possibly a scanner driver issue but still unpleasant. Still, these are relatively minor grumbles. Once video was successfully embedded, the built-in player worked well, and if you need to distribute multimedia documents without relying on the web the new PDF format is a great option. Acrobat.com, now in beta, is already useful; and gathering responses from PDF forms is significantly easier in version 9.

Despite these benefits, for many users who simply need to convert documents to PDF, Acrobat is not an essential purchase. Further, Burton Group analyst Guy Creese believes that the format is out-of-step with the web. "The mental model of PDF (a paper
lookalike for documents) means that Adobe is not thinking of content as recombined snippets, which is what XML is starting to allow. XML, XQuery, publishing on the fly, wikis, are all driving companies to create dynamic documents rather than snapshots of documents," he told
me.

An annoyance for Mac users: the Extended Pro version, which includes video conversion, only works on Windows.

Author: Tim Anderson

25 Jul 2008