Adobe Acrobat 4

PDF is a popular format for distributing documents on the

Web. To make PDF documents, you need Adobe Acrobat, which is currently in

version 4. The new version has many enhancements and new features–adding

digital signatures for enhanced security, support for multiple languages like

Korean, Japanese, and Chinese, etc. Enhancements like the tool bar and command

bar make for convenient and easy maneuvering.

Working with the new package is pretty easy, and the

extensive help makes it even simpler. You can convert any document, including

Web pages, or forms with JavaScript, to PDF. Acrobat has a JavaScript tool for

editing the script. To create PDF files, you can either open or import a file

from within the application, or simply drag-n-drop a file directly on the

Acrobat icon on your desktop. It can also do batch processing, where it converts

complete document folders at one go. Once you have the PDF document, you can

annotate it, insert post-it notes, etc.

Advanced tools like the Movie tool let you insert a link to a

QuickTime, MOV or AVI file. When you click on the link, the file starts playing

from within the PDF document. The Link tool lets you create hyperlinks and can

also be used to reset or submit created forms in the document.

The right-click mouse menus in Acrobat 4 come in handy for

quickly changing the properties of any document, say the color of an icon, or

the font of text. Inserted objects are also customizable, in that properties

like border width, color, etc, can be changed.

Acrobat uses an advanced search option, that lets you index

all PDF documents on your system. When you do a search after this, all documents

will be queried to find a match. You can put specific or even vague queries, and

various kinds of queries–word specific, phonetic, and even word proximity ones

can be efficiently handled.

We converted various documents to PDF and got some

interesting results. We found that the PDF size for documents like MS Excel or

Word with embedded images remained the same after conversion. However, a JPG

image file balloons up to more than 10 times the size when converted to PDF.

Other graphics formats like GIF, BMP, and PNG didn’t change significantly, and

TIF files were slightly compressed.

The package has many good security features. It lets you sign

your documents digitally, so that the receiving end can verify the document’s

authenticity. Documents can also be password protected with read-only or editing

rights.

At Rs 14,500, this feature-rich product is worth a buy.

Ankur Saxena at PCQ Labs