Acrobat 8 Help: Options & formats
One reason for continuing to visit AcrobatUsers.com is the growing knowledgebase of information about the latest Acrobat product releases, an information stash that includes the most recently added “Ask an expert” feature where select gurus answer user-submitted questions.
If you want help with Acrobat 8 or Adobe Reader 8, of course, a good place to start is — to state the obvious — the Help documentation from Adobe Systems. When a program is launched, the browser-based content appears under, of all places, the Help menu. If you select the Complete Help option, the Adobe Help Viewer opens, making it easy to browse topical sections or to search the detailed documentation. The How To option provides an overview of the most common tasks.
With previous versions, when you installed Acrobat, one of the files included was a PDF version of Help, suitable for printing. However, many people never realized they had the PDF readily available — you had to know where to look to find it. For that reason, we posted the Acrobat 7 Help file in PDF for download.
If you’ve already installed Acrobat 8, there’s no need to go searching for the Help file in PDF. For whatever reason, as my colleague Duff Johnson has previously pointed out in his PDF Perspective blog, it’s not part of the standard product installation. The file does exist — on the installer CD for both Macintosh and Windows. You just need to copy the Acrobat 8 Help.pdf file to your drive if you want a copy readily available.
As the popular exclamation goes: That’s not all!
In the Help Resource Center on Adobe.com, you’ll find complete product Help and documentation — choose the product from the drop-down menu listing to go to a page of related resources. Each product-specific page includes links to an online HTML version or a downloadable PDF of the Help file for that application — including Acrobat 8 Professional, Acrobat 8 Standard (Windows only), Adobe Reader 8 and Acrobat Connect. Most also include a separate “Getting Started” document.
The following PDFs for each of these Help files are available for download:
- Acrobat 8 Professional [PDF: 24.5 MB]
- Acrobat 8 Standard (Windows only) [PDF: 16.6 MB]
- Adobe Reader 8 [PDF: 6.9 MB]
- Acrobat Connect Enterprise [PDF: 8.2 MB]
- Acrobat Connect [PDF: 2.1 MB]
NOTE: If you plan to download more than one of the Help files from Adobe.com, be aware that the different documents have the same help.pdf filename, so you could end up inadvertently overwriting files.
