For me, the Adobe/Macromedia merger has finally borne fruit today, with the announcement of Acrobat 9. While CS3 had a few nods to the fact that the two company’s programs would play together (barely), this new version of Acrobat makes it clear by integrating the Flash (SWF) format into the PDF viewer.
The demos I’ve seen of Acrobat 9 make it obvious to me that this will be a very important update for this technology — not just because of the rich interactive features, but because it feels more like a Creative Suite application and they’ve finally made a number of features usable that were hidden or overly-clunky before. For example, from their press release:
With the intelligent Overprint Preview feature, print professionals now can accurately view interactions between overlapping objects because Overprint Preview automatically toggles on and off in Acrobat 9 Pro and Adobe Reader 9. Print professionals also can reliably convert colors from one color space to another, switch RGB and CMYK blacks to solid black, and map one color to another color, including mapping colors to Pantone spot colors using built-in, industry-standard Pantone libraries. The Compare Documents feature identifies differences including changes to text, text formatting, images, line weights and backgrounds between versions of documents.
The overprint thing is awesome. No more telling your client, “Oh, wait, did you turn on overprint preview? Yeah, you have to do that or else that PDF won’t look right for you. Sorry.” And the new Compare Documents feature is scarily good.
As Adobe releases more information about those and other features, I’m sure we’ll be discussing them here. One thing which is very pleasing is that it does launch and respond much faster than it has in the past.
Acrobat is shipping mid-way through the Creative Suite upgrade cycle, of course, so Adobe is sneaking it into a (not-free) 3.3 upgrade to the Suite. From their press release:
Adobe Systems Incorporated today announced that the new Adobe® Acrobat® 9 Pro software will be integrated into Adobe Creative Suite® 3.3 Design Premium and Standard editions, Creative Suite 3.3 Web Premium and Creative Suite 3.3 Master Collection editions. Adobe Creative Suite 3.3 Design Premium also includes Adobe Fireworks® CS3 as a special offering for designers who need to rapidly prototype and generate Web sites. This powerful update to Adobe’s industry-standard design and development software gives designers, Web professionals and print service providers new ways to create and deliver engaging content
They’re also sticking Fireworks into the Design Premium CS3 bundle, perhaps because someone found it on a shelf and said, “hey, anyone know what this is? No? Okay, let’s throw it in the box.” (Actually, Fireworks is a pretty cool program, but to me this move is just another indication of Adobe’s deep ambivalence around having separate Web and Design versions of the Suite. As far as I’m concerned, someone at Adobe just needs to get over their issues and merge the two products into one, once and for all. The distinction only gets in the way now.)
It appears that if you already have CS3 Design Premium, the upgrade will cost $159 in the US. (Given previous pricing, I assume that means the upgrade will be 2-3 times that of the US version, for no adequately-explained reason beyond “because we can.” Sorry… couldn’t help myself… I’m still angry about Adobe’s overseas pricing of the Suite.)
This article was last modified on January 18, 2023
This article was first published on June 2, 2008
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