My favorite new features in Acrobat 8

by Ted Padova

This article is the first in a series of five articles dedicated to the new features introduced in Acrobat 8. Adobe has introduced many new features in this latest iteration of Acrobat — too many for the scope of this article — so I'm going to narrow down the playing field to my top ten personal favorites. Keep in mind that these features are my choices and not necessarily the ones that Adobe believes are the dandiest new features. Here's my list of the top ten features in Acrobat 8 that I personally like best about this great new product release.

1. Enabling enrichment

Many of us applauded Adobe when Acrobat 7 introduced enabling PDFs with special usage rights for Adobe Reader users. In Acrobat 7, a simple menu command allowed you to add usage rights for Reader users to participate in comment reviews.

Adobe wasn't stingy about the commenting feature in Acrobat 7. They gave us all the comment and markup tools with Reader enabled documents as the Acrobat Professional user had. Now in Acrobat 8, Adobe wows us with a long time request from many Acrobat and Reader users: The ability to enable PDF files so Reader users can save form data. That's right, in Acrobat 8 Professional, you can enable PDFs with special features for saving PDF forms with the data filled in. In Acrobat 8, you use a simple menu command from the Advanced menu to open the dialog box shown in Figure 1. Just click the Save Now button and your file is enabled for Adobe Reader users for commenting, form field saving, and digital signatures.

Figure 1

Restrictions do apply and there's a lot to the enabling features in Acrobat 8, so stay tuned for one of my next articles covering all you want to know about enabling PDF documents with Adobe Reader extensions.

2. Combine and package PDF documents

Back in the days of Acrobat 6, Adobe introduced a nice little menu command to create a PDF document from multiple files. Any file compliant with the Create PDF From File command could be combined along with PDF files to create a single PDF. That command sure beat the Document > Insert Pages command, because you could add files that needed to be converted to PDF and organize the files before the PDF was created.

A couple generations down the road, Acrobat 8 offers two super commands for combining files. The Combine Files command and the Create PDF Package command follow along the path of the Create PDF From Multiple command introduced in Acrobat 6. These two separate new features are used for different purposes.

Combine Files builds on the Create PDF From Multiple command and sports an entirely new wizard where you select files and choose some attributes (see Figure 2). One of the great features of Combine Files is the ability to select specific pages in any file that you want to combine with other documents.

In the same dialog box you can choose to create a PDF Package. PDF Packages enable you to do some things that you can't do with Combine Files such as combining secure PDFs and Adobe LiveCycle Designer XML forms. You can create packages of emails and search through an entire package. I'll cover more about these two great new features in a later article in this series.

Figure 2
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3. Customize toolbars

With every new release of Acrobat, we see more tools added to the program. The list is long and managing the tools becomes more difficult. A nice new feature added to Acrobat 8 is the More Tools window. You can now pick and choose all the individual tools you want loaded and docked in the Toolbar Well.

Accessing the More Tools window is easy. Just open a context menu on the Toolbar Well and select More Tools at the bottom of the menu. Alternately, you can select Tools > Customize Toolbars. Either command opens the More Tools window as shown in Figure 3. Just scroll the list and check the boxes for the tools and toolbars you want to open in any of the Acrobat viewers.

Figure 3

4. New forms features

There are several new features added for working with Acrobat PDF forms and LiveCycle Designer XML forms. Picking out a single one of these new features is difficult because there are several that are so useful and appealing. One that tops my list is the ability to automatically populate PDF files with form fields. Now in Acrobat 8 you can convert a document like a Microsoft Word file designed as a form to PDF, hit a menu command and your document is automatically populated with form fields. If you're working with a large number of legacy forms created in a program like Microsoft Word, this feature is bound to save you a lot of time.

Forms designers take note: I'll go into more depth on this new forms feature and some of the other new forms editing additions in a later article.

5. PDF Optimizer

What's new in the PDF Optimizer? For me, the most exciting new feature is form field flattening. You can now open a populated PDF form and use the PDF Optimizer to discard all the form fields while stamping down the data. In Acrobat 7 when you eliminated form fields, Acrobat tossed the data along with the fields. Now in Acrobat 8, your data stays while the fields are deleted. For web hosting smaller files, this feature can be a big help in reducing file sizes when you don't need the form fields to re-edit forms, or when you want to redact documents.

6. Acrobat Connect

Acrobat 8 is one of the first of the Adobe products to integrate the inherited programs from the Macromedia acquisition. Macromedia Breeze -- now renamed Acrobat Connect -- is launched from within Acrobat via Start Meeting task tool.

Acrobat Connect sessions are designed for conferencing with audio and video support. You can show PDF/PowerPoint slide presentations or any document from any kind of file in the Acrobat Connect window. Participants can comment either in audio or by typing text in the workspace as shown in Figure 4. What's really neat is a speaker can give a presentation delivering audio and participants can type questions, which are answered by a moderator's assistant, all within the same workspace. This keeps the presentation flowing without interruption, yet all participants can read questions and answers as they are posted.

Figure 4
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7. Redacting documents

Redacting documents is a method used for deleting sensitive information. Using the redaction tools (Figure 5) you can mark words for deletion in PDFs, search and redact and apply redactions. Things like personal data, classified data, minor's names and incriminations in legal documents, and so on may need to be deleted from files before distribution. Using the redaction tools permanently delete sensitive data from PDF files.

Figure 5
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8. Image editing

Image editing may not be a biggie in some users' eyes, but I personally like the options you now have to edit images in PDF documents. You can click an image, size and reshape the image, rotate images and crop them all within a PDF file without using an external editor.

9. Shared reviews

Comment and review just keeps getting better in Acrobat. Some of the more difficult options for engaging in online reviews have been simplified in Acrobat 8. Now you can more easily identify shared folders and host files for shared reviews.

10. Embed index files

Indexes can now be embedded in PDF documents using a simple menu command to open a dialog box where index files are selected (see Figure 6). Using Acrobat Search you can search an index file embedded in a PDF or search multiple indexes attached to multiple PDF documents. Search always works much faster when using an index file than when searching PDF files without indexes and the new addition for attaching indexes makes finding and loading indexes a snap.

Figure 6

There are many more new features in Acrobat 8 than what I've covered here. My abbreviated list includes some of my favorites. Visit acrobatusers.com for more articles and blog posts from my colleagues covering the new features you can enjoy with this great product release.

If you're wondering about any shortcomings related to Acrobat 8, keep an eye on my blog for a list of items we either lost in this upgrade or features I hoped would have been included.