Adobe Acrobat 8 Seattle WA

The search for an easy, common format clients like has led to the growth of PDFs in digital workflow. Now Adobe has upgraded the Acrobat family to Adobe Acrobat 8 for easier creation of PDFs, even though some say further versions are needed to make it easy to convert and integrate all types of reprographic documents.

Many of the features of the newest Acrobat tools include AutoCAD-to-PDF conversion with interfaces familiar to anyone who has used Macromedia products such as Dreamweaver's Web creation suite. That's because Adobe recently acquired Macromedia, which also owns Flash. Adobe says integration of Flash-like features makes conversions easier and faster, but whether reprographers will like the Macromedia-like features is a matter of preference.

The new Acrobat 8, released last November, supersedes Acrobat 7 released December, 2004. It builds on integration with AutoCAD in earlier releases, including Acrobat 6 (2003). But now Adobe is building its AutoCAD-to-PDF features for speed.

"If there are any areas where we're getting feedback from customers on performance, we continue to improve the performance," said Patrick Aragon, senior product marketing manager, for Adobe Systems, San Jose, CA. "Things like the speed with which you created a PDF from a DWG—some of our customers felt that was a little bit slow with Acrobat 7, so in Acrobat 8, the conversion speed is quite a bit faster. In many cases, it's up to 90 percent faster."

Architects, engineers and construction professionals (AEC) were extensively surveyed right about the time of product release. A need to cut travel brought about such features as Adobe Connect, an upscale hybrid of the former MacroMedia Breeze interface that allows easy collaboration and mark-up of a PDF document.

The $159 Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional upgrade has a minimum requirement of 256 megabytes of random access memory with 512MB even better. The Pro program takes about 1.68 gigabytes of hard-drive space—small for many reprographers who have hard-drive space measure in terabytes. The cost for the full software package of Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional is $449. A 30-day trial is available at:

www.adobe.com/products/acrobatpro/tryout.html.

Acrobat 3D, version 8, was announced in late January ($545 for and upgrade, full for $995).

A check of websites and magazines in the AEC industry revealed at least some displeasure with the design of the software. William Munson III, executive vice president of CADzation, McHenry, Ill, says some AutoCAD files converted to PDF with Acrobat 8 don't convert correctly and print.

"It's not that it's cumbersome," said Munson. "It's that it doesn't convert everything correctly."

Some conversions require a workaround. For example, PLT-to-PDF conversion doesn't have a button for conversion but Avalon says it does so using the printing function (see sidebar on tips and tricks).

For Those with AutoCAD and Those Without

Adobe found a lot of reprographic AEC customers might have a set of DWG files or a sheet set (DSP file from AutoCAD) to convert in a batch. The new Acrobat 8 provides support for the AutoCAD sheet-set file (DSP). As part of the batch process conversion, settings can be saved for document sets run repeatedly.

"What we've added this time around in our support for AutoCAD is we've provided batch creation of DWG files from AutoCAD," Aragon said. "You have a menu option there where you can create files in batches and it still retains all the information you had before, which was page size, layout information, and scale information."

Another feature renders itself handy for the professions such as Realtors putting together a disclosure. If the Realtor doesn't have AutoCAD or AutoCAD LT, the Realtor can convert a DWG, DSP or DWF file to PDF by dragging and dropping it to Adobe 8 or Acrobat 3D, version 8. Presto, conversion occurs and the original's page size and layout information is retained.

"This is actually a big change from all previous versions of the product," Aragon said, "where we created that integration and where you actually had to have a copy of either Acrobat Professional or Acrobat 3D up alongside your CAD application—in this case, AutoCAD."

Collaboration Tools Abound

While AEC professionals collaborate on documents in Web planrooms or through Web site technology, Adobe's collaboration suite, Acrobat Connect, allows starting a meeting instantly and without a Web browser.

"The benefit of Connect is for the person on the other end," Aragon said. "All they have to have is the Flash player installed. So if you wanted to join me in my room for a meeting I have going today, you could just go to my personal URL, which is persistent or very similar to my e-mail address. I can personalize it or name it anything I want and it's always on. So there's no reason to call and schedule a certain time to be there. You can come and go there anytime you want."

Adobe had a Microsoft-Outlook linked sharing with Acrobat 7 that made sharing large files limited, so shared review has been implemented.

"What shared review allows you to do is place that document on a server location or on a network folder that's a share point, workspace location or a Webdav (Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning) location if you used that standard to put it up," Aragon said. "With the shared review process, you don't have to send them the whole document. You can send them the whole document or you can send a link to the document and you can ask them to comment on it at that time."

Munson said the collaboration features are "cool," including those not requiring a Web browser, and said they would assist architecture and engineering workflow. "The Adobe connect is another piece of Macromedia that they folded in so you said have Web access and all you need is the Acrobat reader or a version of Acrobat to collaborate that way," Munson said.

Neal McChristy is a freelance writer who has written about the office-equipment and reprographic industry for over 11 years. He welcomes feedback about the articles he writes for the wide-format industry and would like to have readers suggest future topics. Contact him at nmcchristy@cox.net.