Towards year-end Adobe will introduce Acrobat 8, a serious upgrade of its primary tool for creating and editing PDF documents. So far, this Improved pre-flighting with automatic error fixing

New customer creatable JDF job ticket to printer's specs

Towards year-end Adobe will introduce Acrobat 8, a serious upgrade of its primary tool for creating and editing PDF documents. So far, this hasn't caused a wave of excitement in the printing industry, possibly because Adobe's deadly dull launch announcements stress on-line collaborative approval cycles, interactive forms, and not much else.

Don't be disheartened: Acrobat 8 actually includes some really useful tools for printers and designers, including a useful implementation of JDF that lets printers and publishers at the receiving end control how customers create, check and even repair PDFs before they're transmitted. Some printers report that between a third and a half of customer-submitted PDFs have to be fixed on arrival, so this new feature is potentially a winner.
As before, Acrobat 8 will be available as Standard and Professional editions, for Windows or Mac OS X (now in Universal Binary for both new Intel Macs and old PowerPCs). Each edition actually supplies two programs: Distiller, which mainly creates PDFs through the print menu; and Acrobat itself, which can edit existing PDFs to add security, bookmarks, interactivity, scripts, video and other features.

Initially Acrobat 8 Professional will only be released as part of an updated Adobe Creative Suite 2.3 Premium, the best-selling bundle of programs that also gives you Adobe InDesign (layout), Illustrator (vector graphics), Photoshop (image editing) and GoLive (web design). This will cost 1,269 Euro (Rs76,140), or 189 Euro (Rs 11,340) as an upgrade. You'll be able to buy Acrobat 8 Standard and Professional as standalone programs too, but Adobe hasn't revealed the release dates yet.

Anyone involved in professional print will probably need the Pro version, as this includes the pre-flight checking of files for common printing errors and the related ability to create validated PDF/X files (which exclude any non-printable elements such as video files). Acrobat 8 Professional can support PDF/X-1a, PDF/X-3, PDF/X-4 (a proposed standard that can support transparency for use with Adobe's next-generation PDF Print Engine Rip) and PDF/A (archiving). It can also output Ghent Workgroup PDF/X varieties for specialties such as newspapers or packaging.

Acrobat could already combine separate PDFs (or compliant files such as JPEG or TIFF) within a single new PDF. Acrobat 8 improves on this with a new menu and the ability to set the reading order of contents. It also has a new ability to combine multiple PDFs and other files (such as eMails, web pages, 3D objects) into a PDF ‘Package' that keeps the contents as separately viewable and navigable files. You can edit these to create consistent headers, footers and watermarks throughout.

Naturally, office workers are still catered for — Mac and Windows versions install one-button PDF writing from Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint. The Windows version extends this to Microsoft Project, Access, Publisher and Internet Explorer. Emails in Outlook or Lotus notes can also be output as PDFs. It's now easier to create interactive PDF forms by adding fields to existing PDFs or converted Office documents.

Acrobat 8 can also export a greater range of file formats than before. It can convert PDFs to Word documents, with an attempt at preserving the layouts, though this wasn't terribly successful on our Beta copy. It can also convert PDF to HTML 3 or 4.01 web pages with CSS, again, again without much success in our test.

A new security feature allows ‘redaction,' meaning the blacking-out and permanent removal of parts of the text or images so PDFs can be sent to people who aren't authorised to read the full contents. Government spooks will love this.

All these new features mean that Adobe has created yet another new file format to handle them, PDF 1.7, which means updating its free Adobe Reader utility as well. Reader 8 can now be used to fill and re-save forms for the first time – it can also add digital signatures (both these initially have to be ‘Enabled' by Acrobat 8 Pro in the original PDFs). The CAD and engineering-oriented Acrobat 3D will also be updated to v.8 standard.

It's possible to write PDFs without buying Acrobat 8 — InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator can write fully-featured PDFs without Acrobat Distiller, and all of them are included in the lower-cost Creative Suite 2 Standard Edition. Current versions of Quark XPress layout and Corel Draw design programs can also write PDFs without Acrobat. Any Macintosh running OS X can write very basic PDFs from any program, via the standard print menu.

So, what does Acrobat 8 offer to tempt printers and designers to part with their upgrade money? Adobe has altered the user interface and reorganised toolbars, but that's a minor matter. More important is the expanded pre-flighting, which now becomes the basis of a PDF creation workflow as well as a JDF job ticket generator.

Based on Callas' technology, pre-flighting was first seen in Acrobat 6 and given a friendlier user interface in Acrobat 7. Acrobat 8 extends this with the useful ability to repair or change some settings automatically so you don't need to backtrack to the original layout program and re-output the PDF.

The really clever part is that Acrobat can now save the PDF creation, pre-flighting and repair instructions as a separate JDF job ticket which can be passed to customers who run it on their own copy of Distiller. Previously you could transfer Job Option files, which only controlled the PDF creation settings.

The JDF ticket menu is both comprehensive and surprisingly easy to use, with the ability to set up full production intent details for downstream processes, plus contact and pre-flight specifications that can be passed to PDF creation sites.

The new JDF facility can even be used with the updated InDesign CS2.3 to control how it creates PDFs, and then automatically check they match the receiver's specifications. At the time of writing, Adobe had only released a Beta copy of Acrobat 8 Professional and not InDesign CS2.3, so it wasn't possible to test this remote control of PDF creation.

Adobe itself seems to be most excited by its new web conferencing product, called Acrobat Connect. A stripped down version of the existing Macromedia Breeze, this is sold as a separate program which runs the on-line meetings as ‘rooms' on an Adobe-hosted server — the price hasn't been announced yet, but will include a subscription to the service. Acrobat Standard, Pro and Adobe Reader can all link to Connect meetings.

Printers will inevitably have to buy Acrobat 8, on the basis that customers will soon start to send them PDF 1.7s, so they'll need to be able to open and print them (though the free Adobe Reader can do this if there's no need for editing). However, the improved pre-flighting with automatic error fixing, plus the ability to use JDF to remote-control customer PDF creation, look genuinely useful. These should justify the purchase of the full Acrobat 8 Professional. Some printers report that between a third and a half of customer-submitted PDFs have to be fixed on arrival, so this new feature is potentially a winner.