Adobe Acrobat
Reasons for using Acrobat
Adobe Acrobat is an essential tool in today's electronic workflow. you can use Acrobat Standard, Acrobat Pro, or Acrobat Pro Extended to create virtually any document in Adobe portable Document Format (PDF), preserving the exact look and content of the original, complete with fonts and graphics. Additionally, Acrobat now provides native support for Adobe Flash technology, so you can be sure that multimedia components in a PDF will play smoothly.
You can unify documents, spreadsheets, presentations, email, rich media, and more into a single, cohesive PDF Portfolio. In fact, you can manipulate the files in a PDF Portfolio without affecting the PDF Portfolio as a whole - or the original file itself.
You can distribute PDF documents reliably and securely by email or store them on the web, and intranet, or a CD. With shared reviews, you and your colleagues can collaborate easily as you perfect a document. Reviewers can view and comment on your work, regardless of the platform they work on. Acrobat makes it easy to collect and organize data from reviews or from forms.
You can use any version of Acrobat 9 to create interactive forms and enable users of the free downloadable Adobe Reader 9 software to save the completed form.
- A PDF file can be opened by anyone by using Adobe Acrobat Reader (free software which can be downloaded from the software download page. By converting your documents or files to PDF, it doesn’t matter if the recipient doesn’t have the same software that you created the original documentation in.
- A PDF file can have different levels of security attached to it. For example you can prevent people from printing, changing or copying it.
- A PDF file is often smaller in size than the original, which makes it more efficient to email or put on the World Wide Web (www).
- PDF files are ideal for the www because you can maximise the use of hyperlinks and bookmarks to aid in navigation.
- Several documents can be combined into the one PDF file. For example you could have a 3 page report created in a word processing document, a page of figures created in a spreadsheet program and a diagram created in a CAD program. These 3 completely different types of files can be combined into the one, which can be opened by anyone with Acrobat Reader.
- Documentation sent to printers for professional output sometimes ‘shift’ when opened (usually due to different fonts and printers being used). By converting your documentation to a PDF file, the printers will get a copy of exactly what left your office.
- PDF files are created in a universal file format which means that different platforms can access the file. For example, the file may have been created in a Windows environment but it will be able to be read by someone in an Apple MAC environment as long as they have Acrobat Reader for that platform.
Acrobat is not an authoring tool. By that we mean you do not create documents from scratch with Acrobat. You can make simple changes to a document like correct a spelling mistake or change a heading but it is often easier to make the changes in the original software application and re-convert to PDF format than it is to use Acrobat to make the change.
You cannot make any changes in Acrobat Reader unless you have been given permission by the creator.