A few months ago I received an email from a representative of Adobe, asking me to review Adobe Acrobat on my blog. Naturally, I was flattered, and agreed on the spot. A few weeks ago, Acrobat 8 Professional arrived in my mailbox, and I’ve been playing around with it ever since. So, here is my first official review for 540 Mbps: Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional.

I’ve never been interested in purchasing Adobe Acrobat. In fact, I’ve always kind of been annoyed by Adobe’s Portable Document Format, or PDF – sure they looked pretty, but I couldn’t edit them without buying the full product (a hefty $449 at current prices). It wasn’t until I actually installed the program and played around with some of its less-advertised features that I realized how cool some of them are.

Features

Create PDFs from websites. By far, I’d consider this to be Acrobat’s most useful feature. I can distinctly remember trying to “leech” websites years and years ago, desperately trying to preserve a webpage in full, worried the webmaster would delete it soon (I was an 11-year-old geek, so what?). Acrobat does exactly this for you.

Much easier than screen-capturing every page.

You simply give it a web address, and it will save that page as a fully editable PDF file. What’s more, you can specify how many “levels” of pages Acrobat will leech for you. “http://www.website.com/directory/” will save every page in that directory as a PDF. You can also tell it to save the entire website as a PDF, essentially allowing you to brose a site offline (all the links are redirected to other saved PDF pages).

I did this to 540 Mbps, and came up with a 646-page PDF file that includes every single page of my website and looks almost identical to the original. Best part? It’s only 8.6 megabytes.

Webpages don’t look exactly the same, however. Saving a page of my high school’s theatre website shows a few discrepancies in the formatting.

Another feature I enjoyed was saving PDF files into other formats which you can actively edit. I saved a screenplay I wrote (in PDF format) into a word document: it worked, though the formatting was less than perfect.

Saving multiple file formats into one document is no trouble at all – here are four different formats saved as one PDF. Perfect (though a bit ugly, given my file selection).

A .jpg, .doc, .shtml, and .html are combined flawlessly.

Heh, you can even save PDFs as HTML files, incorporating CSS! Mind you, they look terrible, but it’s a start.

Text Recognition is ready to use in Acrobat, and for the most part is very effective. OCR, or Optical Character Recognition, had been around for decades, and can even be used to recognize printed sheet music (a technique which just last month saved me from entering in thousands of notes into Finale Notepad). In Acrobat, it’s a simple button you press to activate OCR, and in all the tests I performed on it, the feature had exceptional accuracy. I honestly have to say that the price of Acrobat is almost worth it for this feature (though I’m sure you can find much cheaper OCR programs out there).

Regardless of the background or font, most text can become editable within seconds (top). It doesn’t work as well on physical letters, however, such as signs on buildings (bottom).

Problems

Although most files converted into PDF format flawlessly, I ran into trouble with a few formats. Microsoft Excel files, for example, left my computer a frozen mess.

I encountered some problems when printing different formats to PDF as well. Photoshop documents were severely cropped, and Excel files left me wanting for some additional options to select from while printing, such as printing scale.

Text became overlapped in Excel files (back), but it was still fully editable (front).

Final decision? Despite some minor issues with formatting, Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional is a powerful program that does much more than simply create Printable Document files. Unless you’re a professional that deals with PDFs regularly however (and will utilize the “Meeting” feature, where multiple people can collaborate on files in real time), it’s not worth the $450. Students, however, can get the program for about $160, and I’d definitely shell out that for a program like this (OCR, file conversion, webpage archiving…). Basically, if you think any of the features I’ve talked about would be helpful to you, they’re going to seem even more useful once you get your hands on them. Students: this really is a program you’re gonna want for your system. Those who don’t qualify for the educational discount: you’re better off finding dedicated programs for OCR and web archiving.

8/10

I’m pretty sure it’s “Portable Document Format”, not “Printable Document File”.

You’re probably right - I just did a quick check on Wikipedia for it when I wrote this. Just goes to show that user-generated content can be very inacurate sometimes…