Acrobat Does Web Integration

Jenny Donelan

Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF) hasn't made the paperless office a reality, as many people thought it might when the product first shipped two years ago. However, it has changed work habits at many businesses, particularly graphics-intensive ones such as publishing, advertising, and engineering. With Adobe Acrobat, you can distill ponderous, graphics-heavy documents into tidy, e-mailable files that long-distance clients and coworkers can view and annotate electronically.

Adobe has added a hefty list of Web-integration features to Acrobat 3.0. You can view Acrobat files within Web browsers such as Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer. You can also embed a PDF file into a Web page so that it can be viewed on the fly, provided the user has the Acrobat 3.0 Reader. The new Acrobat also provides better compression and more choices for compressing graph ics. Acrobat 3.0 compressed an 83-KB PostScript file created by QuarkXPress to 33 KB, compared to 50 KB when compressed by Acrobat 2.0. Version 3.0 supports JPEG, LZW, and ZIP compression options.

With additional power, however, comes added size. The Adobe Reader has increased from 1.5 MB to more than 2 MB.

Overall, Adobe Acrobat 3.0 adds welcome power and features, particularly in the area of Web publishing.

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Where to Find

Adobe Acrobat 3.0...................$295

Adobe Systems, Inc.
San Jose, CA
Phone:    (800) 272-3623 or (408) 536-6000
Internet: 
http://www.adobe.com/acrobat

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