Average Rating: 
Rating: - Nuclear Specialist - Procedure Writer
I just started using Adobe Acrobat 5.0 because my LAN environment has many different video and printer drivers. Documents opened on one PC would look different when opened on another PC. The total page count would vary from one PC to another. I use WordPerfect 9.0 in a Windows NT 4.0 environment to maintain procedures. WordPerfect is sensitive to the different printer drivers and PCs. The continual upgrades of printers and PCs challenged me to find some way to minimize the impact of different fonts/printers/drivers/video cards, etc. Acrobat is not as friendly to WordPerfect as it is to Word so I have to manually reestablish links (bookmarks) when files are updated.Once a file is in .pdf format, it behaves as expected. The look from one PC to another is the same. Acrobat's search capabilities, security options and ease-of-use are also strong points. All these things together convinced me that selecting Adobe Acrobat was a good decision.
Rating:  - Essential yet simple to use
I resisted buying Acrobat 5 and tried a number of shareware/freebie and inexpensive commercial alternatives. The alternatives just aren't good enough unless you are producing uncomplicated documents in Ariel or Times Roman. While essential for the graphic artist, Acrobat embeds itself so seamlessly into your wordprocessor that you hardly notice it. From within Acrobat (the main program), it's easy to e-mail a PDF as an attachment. Editing abilities within the main program are limited. I have discovered the Web capture tool is very useful to capturing websites for offline reading and research. Since it preserves page format and the original location, you can always cite the correct URL. One piece of advice: if people reading your PDF might have old versions of Acrobat Reader, you may need to open Adobe Distiller, which sets the options for Acrobat, and make an older version of PDF the default. I've found a lot of older Acrobat Reader software can't read the newer PDF format. Finally, a plug for Amazon: fast shipping and the genuine product (not greyware or pirateware from eBay) at a great price!
Rating: - Has features I only dreamed about using earlier versions
Version 5 has features I dreamed about in 3.0 and 4.0, but despaired of ever seeing. Adobe made my dreams come true. Here are the highlights that make this an essential tool if you work with PDF files or transform other documents into PDF format: You can now save files in rich text format (RTF), which can be directly opened and edited in Microsoft Word (and other applications). I was able to do this in version 4 with an expensive third-party plug-in that did not always produce the results I was looking for. Version 5 does not need the plug-in and does a much better job. Two other features that I love are the ability to extract images from a PDF file and save them as Tiff, JPEG or PNG graphics. This is really powerful. A nice touch is the user interface, which now makes Acrobat's tool bars look like those in Microsoft Office applications. I thought this was a quantum improvement over the confusing interface in previous versions. Adobe touts added security features in this version, but the only thing I found different is the 128-bit encryption. Version 4 gave me total control over protecting documents from alteration, selecting and copying text and printing. As a consultant I sometimes need to provide clients with intellectual property that I need to protect, and the features that I enjoyed in version 4 have been fully carried over in this version. Another nice feature that has been carried over from the previous version is the ability to open a web page from within Acrobat and save it as a PDF file. I have grabbed many pages from many sites for off-line reading using this feature and it still works without a problem in version 5. Other features that are interesting, but I have not tried, include the ability to create and publish dynamic forms online, and support for XML form data. When I get time I plan to play around with creating and publishing the dynamic forms because I can think of a dozen uses on my web site. Overall this is a solid product that did not cause me the same pain I endured when I moved from version 3 to 4. Everything works as advertised and some of the new features are plain wonderful.
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