Review Summary: With Acrobat 9 Pro, Adobe brings new Web relevance to print-ready PDFs by enabling embedded video and animation. Forms, security, and overall ease of use are also enhanced. This software is a must have for creative firms.
Strengths: Wraps video and animation into PDFs, enhancd 256-bit encryption, improves form management.
Weaknesses: Adobe Acrobat 9 isn't easy to master and tech support is pricey.
This release of Acrobat makes PDFs more dynamic and packs in more new features than prior releases did. Although PDFs have been interactive for some time, such as with Version 8's support for Web-based forms, Acrobat 9 takes the print-ready document format into the so-called Web 2.0 era.
The Portable Document format is maturing from print-readiness to a venue for multimedia content. For the first time, PDFs will play movies via the free Acrobat Reader 9.
Acrobat 9 will also take snapshots of Web pages and convert entire pages or chunks of them to a PDF that preserves links and animation.
For creating online forms, Acrobat 9 adds intelligence to recognize content for conversion to fillable fields. Potentially delighting conference planners, a forms-tracking dashboard will show, for example, the status of responses to a mass party invitation e-mail and let a user send reminders to guests. Responses can be sorted, filtered, and exported to spreadsheets.
Acrobat 9 offers a lot of features that the average consumer seeking to create a basic, print-ready PDF won't need. However, we find this update of Acrobat to be the most important in recent years for business users as well as interactive designers. 256-bit encryption and ease of redactions alone easily could justify the purchase for, say, a law firm. Those who specialize in making presentations with moving images and sounds will find plenty of options at their fingertips.
| Pricing | $449.00 |
| Free Trial | Yes - Download now |
| Print to PDF | Yes - Print to create PDF files from any application |
| Creates hyperlinks | Yes - Auto-acreate hyperlinks and page indexes |
| Combine multiple files | Yes - Create one document from multiple sources |
| Password protection | Yes - Strong 256 bit encrytion and digital signature |
| Access control | Yes - Control how recepients can use the PDFs |
| Convert PDF to Word | Yes - convert text and graphics while preserving formatting and layout |
| Create Editable Fields | Yes - Form Wizard creates forms from paper or electronic documents |
| Edit PDFs | Yes - Review documents using familiar commenting tools such as sticky notes, highlighting, lines, shapes, and stamps |
| Learn more | Acrobat 9 Pro |
