Adobe Acrobat

From ArticleWorld

Adobe Acrobat is a PDF creation, manipulation and editing program. It is often confused with its little brother, Adobe Acrobat Reader (recently renamed to Adobe Reader), a freeware program that can only read PDF files. Adobe Acrobat also includes a number of utilities, including a virtual printer driver to allow all Windows application to "print" to a PDF file.

Features

There are several features that make Adobe Acrobat one of the most popular programs of its kind. Adobe Acrobat supports multiple languages, including those that do not use the Latin alphabet. It can use Hebrew, Arabic, Thai and Vietnamese text, allowing for automatic font updates, extended font packs and dictionaries. Adobe Acrobat supports digital signatures, and, starting from version 7.0, it has a comprehensive support for e-mail-based document reviews. It also includes the capability of filling PDF forms, both online and offline, making it an excellent choice for those who complete electronic tax forms.

Adobe Acrobat Reader runs on several platforms, including Linux, Mac and Windows.

Criticism

Adobe Acrobat has always been regarded as a powerful and stable product. However, some criticism has always existed, especially with versions 5 and 6. Initially, the internationalization support has been quite poor, but this has been improved in newer versions. The only unresolved issue remains that of the speed: Acrobat is painfully slow on some systems, and, even though there are some hacks which can make it run faster, many inexperienced users find themselves running a very slow software that negatively impacts their workflow.