Adobe Acrobat 9 Released, CS 3.3 Available

[clevin]

Yawn.

Does anyone even use Acrobat anymore?

Here's a thought Adobe ... how about making good software instead of relying only on monopolistic practices, copyrights and legal agreements to sell your products and keep your customers?

I just finished putting things together with acrobat, Tiger's preview can do almost nothing with pdf.. I heard preview in leopard can do more, but probably won't meet my need neither.

It is slow.. indeed.

PDF is open standard, and might get into ISO soon, so Im not sure adobe is doing monopolistic practices here.

 

[Willis]

AKA... a bit of a rip off.

At the very least, it should have been a free update or less money.

 

[ClimbingTheLog]

Or how about this one, - Ability to check PDF standards compliance. This is already in there in the preflight panel. They are for sure trying to make money out of nothing.

What's worse is that Acrobat should never produce an invalid PDF. So the new feature is you can check for bugs in Acrobat? Wow, stellar.

wait i have to pay for a minor update... what a load of crap. I'll def. be skipping this update. I shell out all this money for CS3 and now they want more for a minor update for one app

Wait until the next upgrade is only available for upgrade pricing if you bought the last one.

 

[Bern]

So in my case if you already have CS3 to upgrade to CS3.3, which only has Acrobat 9 as anything different in it, it will cost A$199.00. Considering as it's just a point update and the only difference in the suite is the addition of Acrobat 9 I think Adobe are again just ripping off it's customers.

 

[Blue Velvet]

Does anyone even use Acrobat anymore?

Of course! If you work in publishing, prepress, design for instance. But yes, you're right, it doesn't run well on mid-range machines.

I love the full version, Acrobat Pro, it's a really useful piece of software for many people. But I won't be buying this as a single release, but will wait to see what CS4 is like. Interesting and a bit weird to see what further they could bolt onto Distiller.

 

[macintosh tech]

I came upon this the other day. I was wondering why it hadn't broke that they were charging people for this stuff. I saw CS3.3 and was like, cool. Then I saw you had to pay. Not cool Adobe.

 

[bretm]

You can use any Mac app to do this. Firefox, safari, probably opera too can do this. Go to file>print>save as pdf.

This feature is in 10.5 but I'm not sure about earlier versions.

Apple has had this for 7 years. You want a long page? Change the paper size. Duh.

 

[ThunderSkunk]

Most bloated, useless, crashiest, heaviest and most overkill application in the world. I've got .pdf attachments blocked at the domain level of our company. Anyone who wants to send us something can send it nicely, in a proper, usable format. It's crap, and I'm not playing along anymore.

Plagueware.

 

[telecomm]

Most bloated, useless, crashiest, heaviest and most overkill application in the world.

Well, it's not overkill for those who use the features.

I've got .pdf attachments blocked at the domain level of our company. Anyone who wants to send us something can send it nicely, in a proper, usable format.

Enjoy the Word docs. Hope you like Times New Roman!

 

[finchna]

given CS4 has been in the news don't upgrade to 3.3 if you don't need to, wait for 4 and see if it's truly an improvement over 3

 

[137489]

Answered my own questions.... according to the podcast below, if you have acrobat reader 9, you can view the flash as the flash player is built in. so with acrobat reader 9 you do not need flash on your machine to see a flash embedded PDF. they also claim that you can imbed quicktime movies.

http://www.mediafly.com/Podcasts/Ep...tent_into_a_PDF_with_Acrobat_9_Professional_1

I can see where this could be useful - but for a $160 upgrade, or $500 if you have a version lower than 6 - is a bit expensive if this is the only truely added feature (which some say is a feature that always existed, just was broken).

Nice - yes
would I want it - yes
can I justify the cost - no

There are too many other PDF products out there. that do all this with the exception of video.

Now, I never worked with Latex, but it seems you can do this with latex? Here's a link:

http://www.uoregon.edu/~noeckel/PDFmovie.html

 

[137489]

Acrobat 9 ads FLV

I think what people are missing here is the article says FLV - this is the new flash (well, been around for a couple of years now). With Acrobat 7 and up you could use SWF.

Embed Flash files into PDF with Acrobat 7
I read what Bruce Chizen, chief executive officer of Adobe, said after the acquisition "By combining our powerful development, authoring and collaboration software - along with the complementary functionality of PDF and Flash - Adobe has the opportunity to bring this vision to life with an industry-defining technology platform".

Since now we can use FlashPaper 2 to create a PDF (or a SWF) from every printable document and we can also embed Flash files into PDF documents.
These are a few and simple steps to place a SWF file in a PDF using Adobe Acrobat 7 :

open the Advanced Editing toolbar
go to Tools > Advance Editing > Movie Tool and choose a position for your media item
the Add Movie window opens. You can set your option selecting the Content and Poster Settings, content type and other options
Pay attention to your SWF, I noticed some problem with compressed SWF file​

.

But again with all the FLV to SWF converters - I only see Acrobat 9 necessary if you do not want to convert your FLV files into another format like quicktime MOV, AVI or SWF.

 

[sharp65]

Most bloated, useless, crashiest, heaviest and most overkill application in the world. I've got .pdf attachments blocked at the domain level of our company. Anyone who wants to send us something can send it nicely, in a proper, usable format. It's crap, and I'm not playing along anymore.

Plagueware.

I can understand your hate for adobe products, but pdf? LOL

 

[clevin]

Most bloated, useless, crashiest, heaviest and most overkill application in the world. I've got .pdf attachments blocked at the domain level of our company. Anyone who wants to send us something can send it nicely, in a proper, usable format. It's crap, and I'm not playing along anymore.

Plagueware.

the software is slow, but functions are necessary for many users myself included. Don't just throw it into pit because you don't use it.

PDF is about as platform-independent as you can get for a document, what else format do you have in mind that is better?

 

[Mindcrime]

How about people who bought Creative Suite 3 recently? Are they also going to charge them $159 for the upgrade?

I purchased it for my company 2 weeks before Adobe announced Acrobat 9, and so I contacted the local sales rep who sold us the product (in, um, the Philippines since Taiwan doesn't really have a real Adobe presence) and they are giving me a free upgrade. Not sure exactly what the window is, but I think it's most likely 30 days (the rep was hesitant to tell me exactly, which is no surprise in this part of the world).

 

[mdriftmeyer]

Paparazzi captures to PDF, PNG, TIFF, or JPG and is free. It does it as one long page, rather than splitting it into pages.

I haven't used Acrobat for capturing web sites, so I'm not sure how it compares.

I believe the purpose of Web Capture is to reproduce the site behavior/navigation and linking structure already in the site without breaking it.

 

[sterlingindigo]

APPL should buy ADBE

 

[Toe]

Now with enhanced slowness!

As with every previous version of Acrobat, this one includes the special half-as-fast enhancement.

Now you can do all the work in twice the time!

They must really work hard to make each version slower when computers keep getting so much faster. Truly a feat of engineering.

 

[AidenShaw]

...as of right now there is:

MP4
AIF
WMV
MPG
SWF
FLV
MOV
AVI
VOB
and probably a couple of others.

AVI and MOV (and ASF and WMV) are not video formats - they are container file formats. A .MOV file can be QT or H.264 or other formats, an .AVI file can be DIVX or Indeo or RGB or MJPEG or....

This doesn't change the validity of your point, but we should try not to confuse a container file format with the video format (codec) that it contains.

 

[Bubba Satori]

APPL should buy ADBE

 

[_iCeb0x_]

As with every previous version of Acrobat, this one includes the special half-as-fast enhancement.

Now you can do all the work in twice the time!

They must really work hard to make each version slower when computers keep getting so much faster. Truly a feat of engineering.

Well... It's not exactly like that.

Personally, I am getting more and more pissed at Adobe. The last Photoshop version that actually wowed me was 4.0. With every new version, the app seems heavier and more bloated...

Adobe can't really update Photoshop, Illustrator or InDesign quickly enough to make them compatible with Leopard. And I don't accept the excuse that "the codebase is too large, blah blah blah!"

Adobe can't accept that Apple will deprecate Carbon in the future. They don't seem to have any plans on using Cocoa for Photoshop or any other product.

Just take a look at Pixelmator. It offers almost everything Photoshop 3.0 offered, with some nice additions. And it's written in Cocoa by two or three guys, IIRC.

Apple should get more serious and get these Pixelmator guys working for them. With Apple's team, they could make a Photoshop killer with it, easily.

Apple already sort of killed Premiere with Final Cut. I am not sure about Lightroom vs. Aperture...

I don't mean Apple is the only company that can deliver good software, but I trust them more than Adobe.

 

[TwinCities Dan]

Sounds like a pretty powerful update, but $160? I dunno...

 

[clevin]

Just take a look at Pixelmator. It offers almost everything Photoshop 3.0 offered, with some nice additions. And it's written in Cocoa by two or three guys, IIRC.

Im not sure thats true. I don't think Pixelmator offers more than photoshop, nor is it just written from scratch by two or three guys. It is built on top of ImageMagick, with the incorporation of core image and Cairo, etc. It would be great exaggeration to attribute the whole thing to only Pixelmator people.

 

[HLdan]

I really don't need Acrobat or anything it can do. On the rare occasion that I need to fill out a pdf form, Acrobat Reader does a fine job.

You do know Preview fills out forms and and saves them and does just as much if not more than Adobe Reader.

 

[AidenShaw]

cocoa != unix

Adobe can't accept that Apple will deprecate Carbon in the future. They don't seem to have any plans on using Cocoa for Photoshop or any other product.

Aren't you at least a little disturbed that UNIX apps are sometimes easier to do a native port to Windows than to Apple?

Cocoa is a "separate but equal" strategy, which has been struck down as being "not equal".