Acrobat 7 Product Family Feature Matrix

Dan Shea Planet PDF Associate Editor

November 15, 2004

Editor's Note: The feature matrix is as complete and current as possible, but some items may change as new information is released.

For more info on Acrobat 7.0 visit our special Adobe Acrobat 7.0 feature.

With the announcement of the newest installment in Adobe's Acrobat franchise -- version 7.0, to be precise -- we here at Planet PDF thought we'd supply a little information on the members of the new product family. The three distinct applications follow the same basic concepts used for version 6, and are called (surprise, surprise) Adobe Reader 7.0, Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Standard, and Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Professional. Like their predecessors, the products are designed primarily for free, read-only access (Reader), viewing, creation, editing and basic manipulation (Acrobat Standard), and the whole shebang (Acrobat Professional).

Although all enjoy new and updated features, the distinctions between them have increased markedly. As one might expect, the Professional edition has come out the biggest winner in terms of functionality: not only has it gained much in the areas of forms, design and engineering, it is now capable of flagging documents to enable the full suite of commenting tools to be accessed from the free Reader.

This, along with the new security policy administration, streamlined user interface and loading time are some of the key advances of the release. In order to help clarify issues of comparative functionality, there is a detailed feature matrix included below.