Today Adobe announced the forthcoming availability of Acrobat 7, formerly codenamed Vegas. As predicted exclusively by the Design Weblog in September, Acrobat 7 will ship no later than 16 December, 2004.

Like Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator a year before, this latest release of Acrobat abandons its world-famous icon to reveal a distinguished, mature face. Like Illustrator's beloved Venus de Milo, Acrobat leaves behind the nimble juggling of Acro-Man.

Now 12 years old, Acrobat's maturity is obvious not just in its retirement of the sophomoric Acro-Man. In the distinguished creases of 7's face is a new found sagacity and grown up tools tightly focussed on each of Acrobat's three key markets: creative pro, small to mid-sized business, and the enterprise.

Creative Pro

Topping the list of features for creatives is the new press production tools. Missing since Acrobat 4's InProduction add-on, Acrobat 6 re-introduced native preflight into Acrobat. Now 7 has the ability to not only preflight and diagnose common PDF problems like Acrobat 6, but now the ability fix them as well.The new Acrobat includes tools to correct RGB color, transparency, hairlines, printer's marks, and flatten live transparency without having to create a new Adobe PDF file.

Acro-Bites Following the incredible success of Photoshop CS's product activation (Windows only) in reducing piracy of arguably the planet's most pirated software application, Acrobat 7 too will require product activation. During installation users will be prompted to activate Acrobat 7 Standard and Professional via a 30-second online transmission between the installation routine and Adobe's activation server. If the product is not activated at that time, it will run for several days before ceasing to function until activated. The exact number of days was not available at press time. Acrobat 7.0 Professional and Acrobat 7.0 Standard for Microsoft Windows 2000 (with service pack 2), Windows XP Professional, Home and Tablet PC Editions, and Mac OS X v10.2.8 and v10.3, will ship in English on or before 16 December 2004, and in French, German and Japanese in early 2005. Acrobat 7.0 Professional is expected to be available for an estimated street price of US$449. Registered users of Acrobat 4.0, Acrobat 5.0, Acrobat 6.0 Standard, or Acrobat 6.0 Professional can upgrade to Acrobat 7.0 Professional for an estimated street price of US$159. Acrobat 7.0 Standard is expected to be available for an estimated street price of US$299. Registered users of Acrobat 4.0, Acrobat 5.0 or Acrobat 6.0 Standard can upgrade to Acrobat 7.0 Standard for an estimated street price of US$99. The products also will be available through Adobe's Open Options licensing programs. Acrobat Elements for Windows 98 Second Edition, Windows NT® 4.0 (with service pack 6), Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, is immediately available in 15 language versions, including English, French, German, and Japanese. The product, available exclusively through Adobe's Open Options licensing programs, begins at US$39 per seat for a 100-seat license. Acrobat 7.0 Professional will replace Acrobat 6.0 Professional in Adobe Creative Suite Premium with an updated shipping version of the seminole suite, Creative Suite Premium 1.3, in early 2005. At the same time Acrobat 7.0 Standard will replace Acrobat 6.0 Standard in Adobe Creative Suite Standard. No other full version product updates will occur in Creative Suite Premium or Standard—Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, and GoLive will not be updated to the next full versions in Creative Suite 1.3. All Acrobat 7.0 products are currently available for pre-purchase on Adobe.com.

Following closely on the preflight tools is the addition of the long overdue JDF (Job Definition File) file standard. JDF has been a standard for printing and pre-press for many years, as has PDF/X, which Adobe brought to Acrobat in last year's version 6. Now creative and pre-press pros can build PDFs that comply with all the printing industry standards, from start to finish.

Some of the greatest new features for pre-press professionals are borrowed from other industry-standard Adobe applications—namely Photoshop-style droplets for oft-used preflight scenarios, and InDesign's Ink Manager, which allows remapping of spot colors. New total ink coverage, rich black detection, and overprint warnings round out the PDF-control toolkit.

Communication between creative and production is also eased in 7, including Overprint Preview in Adobe Reader—formerly available only in Acrobat Professional—and the ability to embed preflight reports into the PDF as comments for easy transmission back to the designer.

Small to Mid-Sized Business

While Acrobat 7 does not add any significant new features for the small to mid-sized business, it's continued dedication to control over security minutia, reviewing and collaboration, and digital signatures is obvious in every section of the product.

Integration with Microsoft Office is tightened with the addition of the new document assembly feature, a more user-friendly face to the Insert Pages and Append to PDF functions, which allows combining one or many Word, Excel, or PowerPoint files (among others) into a single PDF effortlessly.

Enterprise

Reaffirming Adobe's focus on the enterprise and its new "Simplicity At Work" campaign, Acrobat 7 cements the San Jose company's dominance in the electronic document market of the future.

Long an impediment to the total adoption of PDFs as the platform for document reviewing and electronic forms has been the need for all parties to have a paid-license member of the Acrobat family installed. Adobe Reader, the free PDF viewer available for virtually every computer platform, including PDAs and major cell phones, did not have commenting and digital signature fuctions without the use of the Adobe Document Server with Reader Extensions back-end system (US$75,000 for 10 forms, US$1m for an unlimited number of forms).

In Acrobat 7, however, many of the functions of Adobe Document Server with Reader Extensions, which enables extended functionality in the free Adobe Reader, have been included as part of Acrobat Professional. Now document creators can embed in PDFs and PDF forms the switches to enable commenting and signing features in Adobe Reader. Thus anyone can fill out and digitally sign electronic forms that are legally binding in the United States and a growing number of countries around the world.

Indeed, the process of creating forms, long a clunky feature set of Acrobat, is easier with Adobe LiveCycle Designer (formerly Acrobat Forms Designer), an easy to use, visual form layout environment that more closely resembles Microsoft Access than an Adobe product. Released as a separate product earlier this year after a nine month public beta trial, Adobe LiveCycle Designer 7 will come bundled with Acrobat Professional 7 for Windows.

Also new to 7 is the PDF/A (PDF Archive) format, a new file standard with enhanced search and retrieval of data within the PDFs.

Summary

Acrobat 7 is not the complete overhaul that was Acrobat 6, but it builds upon the steady three-legged foundation poured by Acrobat 6. With critical press and prepress features for creative pros, streamlined business features, and by opening the door to the enterprise's total adoption of electronic documents with the new power given to the ubiquitous and free Adobe Reader, Acrobat 7 kicks over the last stubborn hurdles to total epaper conversion for every document-based workflow.

Acrobat is all grown up.