Acrobat 7.0 - Our First Look
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About the Author
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Richard Crocker Richard Crocker is a director, product designer and marketer at Nitro PDF Software, and first became involved with PDF back in the days of version 1.1 and Acrobat Exchange 2.0. He helped launch the Planet PDF site in 1998. Today you can... More
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Welcome to our Acrobat 7.0 product tour. Over the next few
pages we'll guide you through some of the key new features to come out of Adobe
latest Acrobat family.
Editor's Note:
For more info on Acrobat 7.0 visit our special Adobe Acrobat 7.0 feature.
This is not meant to be a definitive list but more a broad
'first look' at some of the most interesting new things. Once you get your
hands on a copy, be sure to do your own exploring -- you're bound to find many
cool new things not mentioned in these pages.
Note:
Unless otherwise noted, this article
refers to Acrobat 7.0 Professional (i.e. not Standard). While I can make
educated guesses at which features will be included in both, I'm yet to see a
complete breakdown of the differences.
Document Reviewing & Markup
Reader Enabled Commenting
This is probably the boldest change for Adobe Acrobat 7.0
and Adobe Reader 7.0, and appears likely to make a major long-term impact on
both how PDF is used, and the number of people involved in the document review
process.
Acrobat 7.0 (Professional only) now enables you to give
Adobe Reader users permission to use all the commenting and review tools that
were previously only available to Acrobat Professional and Standard users --
basically it was restricted to users who paid for the functionality. This
should mean a far more widespread use of PDF-based document review and, over
time, Adobe will no doubt hope that it moves more Reader users towards buying a
version of Acrobat that allows them to also send PDFs to colleagues and clients
for review.
Adobe Reader with a PDF that has come from an Acrobat 7.0 user.
Shown here are the Commenting and Drawing Markups toolbars and stamps.
During the process of exchanging a PDF for review via email,
you are given the choice to allow Adobe Reader users to participate. It's as
simple as that. You email the PDF to them, and when they open it in Adobe
Reader 7.0, additional toolbars appear with an extensive range of markup and
commenting tools, including:
- Note tool
- Highlight, underline, cross out text tools
- Indicate text edit tools (insert, delete o replace text)
- Stamp tools (including custom stamps)
- Attach file as a comment tool
- Record audio comment tool
- Callout tool
- Cloud tool
- Drawing tools (arrow, rectangle, oval, line, pencil, etc.)
As you step through the Send for Review process tick the
check box to enable the functionality for Adobe Reader users in your review
group
Select Tool
The Select Tool now has its own popup menu with related
options. Using the Select Tool to select text will display a list of related
options, and likewise when selecting an image.
The options available after selecting several rows of text.
New markup tools
Two new markup tools tend to target technical professionals,
but the Callout tool looks useful when adding comments related to images and
other non-text objects.
The Callout Tool lets you create a text box which has an arrow
attached that can point to a specific part of a drawing or document.
The Dimensioning Tool lets you draw a line between points on a
drawing.
Tracker & Newsreader
The 'Track News' functionality in Acrobat 6.0 has been
separated out into the Tracker tool. The main addition to it is that you can
also use the Tracker to subscribe to news feeds.
If you're not familiar with these, numerous sites these days
offer syndicated 'feeds' that let you download a summary of each item into your
'reader' software; it's just a matter of copying the link to the RSS, XML or
RDF format service from a site and copying it into your news reader. The one in
Tracker allows you to build summaries of all the items in PDF and lets you
convert any of the items (usually Web pages) to PDF -- handy if you want to
archive them or print a copy for offline viewing.
Next: Paper to PDF (page 2 of 7)
