Review published in LCCS newsletter, Random Bits, May, 2001
Adobe Acrobat 4.0 Evaluated
by Gary Kurtz, LCCS member
I am sure many of you are familiar with
Adobe Acrobat reader. You probably have it on your own computer. If you don’t,
you can download it at http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep.html.
It is free and with it you can read any documents that have been saved in
the .pdf file format. Acrobat 4.0 is the full version that allows you to save
documents to the .pdf format so you can easily share them with others. The
program works great with other manufacturers’ software programs. This is
especially beneficial if you want to share a document with someone that does not
have the software program that you created it in.
Using Acrobat with Microsoft Office
After
installation the first indication that it had been installed was an Acrobat
symbol in the Microsoft Word toolbar (see screen shot). Acrobat is optimized to
work with Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint and these programs will have the
Acrobat icon in the toolbar. I am writing this review in Word and will save it
in an Acrobat format. To do this I click on the icon and I get a menu with
several options, most notably to specify whether to optimize my document for
press, print or screen. This will also affect the file size.
Modifying text in a PDF file
For my next adventure I open up a price sheet that was sent
to me in pdf format, via email, from one of the manufacturers I work for. Since
this price sheet was created a couple of months ago, 2 of the products had been
lowered in price, but they had not issued a new price sheet reflecting these
changes. With this version of Adobe Acrobat I can now change the prices. I will
select the text tool, highlight the price, and now I am able to change the
numbers to the new lower price. If I wanted to, I could also change the font,
size, justification, etc. This is great because the last time this happened I
had to contact them to make a new price sheet and send it to me, which took a
couple of days.
Using PDF Writer
For
my next project, I opened a Microsoft Publisher file I had put together for one
of my customers. I made this sheet to hand out at one of the educational
conferences we participated in. The document was created to highlight one of the
products we were promoting. In making it I had put a lot of large text and a
photo of the product. In typical Microsoft fashion, this Publisher file was 18.7
megabytes!!!! I thought this would be a good test document to create in Acrobat
format to see if it would be smaller in size. I cannot send the Publisher
document via email to other customers at a size of almost 19 megabytes because
many of the salespeople use 56K modems to check email. I also find that most of
them do not have Microsoft Publisher on their computers and they would not be
able to open it. In order to create an Acrobat document from the Publisher
program I will do different steps than I did to convert the Word document.
While in Publisher, I will select the print function and will see my
normal print window. Next I will click on the arrow to the right of the listing
of the normal printer I use and select the new option, Adobe PDF Writer (see
screen capture). I then get a
window asking me where to save my document with the file extension already set
to .pdf. I named it and chose desktop and the file was saved. I then went to the
new file on the desktop, right clicked and chose properties to see how large the
file was. This is awesome. The file size was now 48K!!! Seeing this kind of
reduction in file size I was concerned about the quality of the data. I opened
the Acrobat file and it looked great on my monitor. I then printed it and was
pleased with quality of the output from my printer. In order to be fair to
Microsoft I decided to print the original 18.7 MB file and compare it to the
just printed Acrobat file. I did find that the original Microsoft Publisher
print was better on the picture of the product on the document, but it should be
considering that the file was 389 times larger. On the text on the document I
could notice a minor difference. If I were to be offered the option of receiving
a 48K document at this quality level vs the Publisher document at 18.7 MB and
its quality level, I would definitely choose the Acrobat file.
It should be noted that quality can easily be improved by
clicking on properties when Acrobat PDF Writer is selected as the printer.
Compression settings can then be adjusted.
But, again, size of the PDF file will be affected — in general,
increasing the quality will increase the file size.
Using Acrobat to capture a Web site
If
you have ever wanted to easily capture and save, print or share a Web page you
will like this feature. I click on the toolbar icon to open web page and then
get a box that I type the Web address in. I have several options available, most
notably I can capture several levels of the Web site — not just the page I am
viewing. I could capture the entire site if desired (see screen capture).
Other features
Now
that I have this image, I will try a couple of other features of Acrobat 4.0.
I want to highlight some of the text on the Web page I have captured.
This is easy to do; I just select the highlight tool icon and select the text
while holding down the left mouse button. You can see the results in the screen
capture below. I also want to add some notes to the saved image. I click on the
notes icon and then click on the document to determine where I want to insert
it. I now have a note box that I can type my note in (see screen capture).
Another option would be to select a text tool or symbol tool and insert these in
my document. An example would be if I needed to get approval of a document that
I had, I could send it and those giving approval would be able to put their
“stamp” of approval on the document and send it back to me.
Summary
To summarize, these are the immediate features of Adobe
Acrobat 4.0 that I have used. There are additional features, and many options
within the tools of the program I have described. As with most good software
programs you will find new benefits as you continue to use it. I have to say
that I was glad to be able to review Acrobat 4.0. This is a program that the
more I use it, the more I like it. I must admit I had high expectations of this
program and those expectations have been exceeded. If you are in a situation
that requires you to share documents, regardless of the originating program, I
highly recommend Adobe Acrobat.
If you are considering purchasing Acrobat, or already own
it, there are tutorials on the Adobe web site that you should check out. I found
them to be helpful in learning the many features of the program. While I was
writing this review I visited the Web site often. Adobe has now released version
5.0 of Acrobat. It will be interesting to see how they have improved an already
great program.
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