What’s Still Needed in Acrobat 8
In the months ahead you’ll hear much about all the nifty new features added to Adobe Acrobat 8. Many of these features are wonderful and you’ll marvel at some of the improvements added to the program. However, with all the new additions there are some areas, that in my opinion, have been left out of this new release. Now don’t get me wrong; and let me say at the onset of this article, that Acrobat 8 is worth upgrading as soon as it’s made available to you. But with all the great new features, there’s still some room for complaints.
Here’s a list of some of what I had hoped for and what I think needs to be improved:
Toolbar Management
What’s new in Acrobat 8 regarding tools and toolbar management is a new Customize Toolbars window. You can load or remove tools from all the toolbars. This is a great addition to Acrobat and let’s you customize your workspace to a view that suits your workflow.
Where’s the complaint? Unfortunately we don’t have a Save Workspace command. The lack of having a Save Workspace command requires you to change tools and toolbars each time you want to engage in a different kind of editing session. If you work on forms, for example, you’ll want to open the Forms Toolbar, the Advanced Editing Toolbar and the Properties Bar. You may want to load different Zoom tools and Page Display tools. Change to another kind of editing session like comment & review and you won’t need those forms tools. You’ll want the Comment & Review tools. What you have to do is scroll the long list of tools and check off the toolbars and tools you don’t want and check the items you want to open in the Acrobat workspace. What a pain!
PDF Templates
Something I’ve wanted for quite some time is having PDF templates I can access from the Create PDF task button. If I have an invoice, a purchase order form, or some other document I routinely use, I’d like to open the Create PDF task button and access a menu command From Template. A list of my custom templates would appear in a submenu and I could select a template, edit it and when I click Save, I’m prompted in a dialog box to provide a new name. My template would never be overwritten and always accessible from a menu command. Unfortunately, no such thing in Acrobat 8.
Form Fields
Some very nice enhancements for creating Acrobat PDF forms have been added to Acrobat 8. We can distribute forms, collect form data, add bar codes, flatten fields, automatically recognize fields in almost any kind of document converted to PDF, track forms in the Review Tracker, enable PDF forms for Adobe Reader users so they can save form data and add digital signatures, and more.
Where’s the complaint? Just one little item I’ve asked for during several previous beta cycles is the ability to rotate form fields in fixed and arbitrary rotations. We still have options for fixed 90-degree rotations, but I’d like to see fields rotated on an arbitrary axis.
When it comes to calculating field data, we still have the same preset calculations for summing data and multiplying field data. Why can’t we get subtract and divide? It’s just another one of my complaints.
Bookmarks
Managing bookmarks in the Bookmarks panel hasn’t seen any improvement in Acrobat 8. We still have to fiddle-fool around trying to move bookmarks up and down and horizontally to reorder the parent/child relationships —there’s got to be an easier way. What about splitting files on bookmarks, copy/paste bookmarks, merge files on bookmarks? In Acrobat 8, we don’t have it.
800% Article Threads
Have you ever clicked the Hand tool on an article thread and notice your document jump up to an 800%? Who in the world is going to read text in an 800% view? This zoom level is controlled in the Genral Preferences under the Max Fit Visible Zoom area. We’ve always had to edit our preferences in earlier Acrobat viewers to set the default zoom to a more comfortable reading level. Well not only is the default still at an 800% view, Adobe just took out the preference option so you can’t change the zoom level. You’re now stuck in all Acrobat viewers to an 800% zoom if you read an article. Since the product is still in development, I’m not sure if it’s going to appear in the final release. If it does, voice your complaints!
Adobe and Apple
This complaint is focused more at Apple than it is at Adobe. I feel sorry for the engineers at Adobe who try to keep up with Apple developments. This complaint involves the newest release of QuickTime (version 7.1.3). By default Apple decided to turn off a preference option that enables you to view Flash files inside a PDF. All your clients and end users receiving PDFs with embedded Flash files need to be alerted to select QuickTime Preferences from the QuickTime Player menu and click the Advanced button. In the Advanced pane you need to check the Enable Flash checkbox. What a pain! Why can’t Apple play on the same court with Adobe?
We have some very nice features for converting mail messages in MS Outlook and Web pages in MS Internet Explorer to PDF, but this is a Windows thing. Why can’t we get it on the Mac for Apple Mail and Safari… another big pain.
Adobe and Microsoft
The poor Mac people are again left out when it comes to using Microsoft products together with Acrobat on the Mac. Any Mac user out there who has run MS Office programs at one time or another must have believed that Microsoft intentionally messes up the Office applications on the Mac. So many program crashes in MS Word have made Mac people crazy. You’d think that by the time we got to the year 2007 and after all these whiz bang power monster computers are in our workplace we could do something simple like use the PDFMaker in MS Office reliably on the Mac. In Acrobat 8 you can wait hours to see the PowerPoint PDFMaker try to convert a simple slide presentation to PDF until you finally give up and just use the Print to PDF option. Word is no champion either. PDFMaker still runs light years slower on the Mac than it does on Windows. And what about the Adobe PDF menu that the Windows users get so they can change conversion settings and get bookmarks in the resultant PDFs? Can’t we get Microsoft to be a little more cooperative with both Apple and Adobe so the Mac version of the PDFMakers match the Windows versions? What a pain.
UI Changes
First thing you’ll notice is the big User Interface (UI) change in Acrobat 8. By default you’ll see your Acrobat window open minimized and appearing with it’s own set of toolbars. Open another PDF and you see another set of toolbars (sometimes a different set). If you want Acrobat to look like the program you’re familiar with where you only have one set of toolbars and you can open several documents together using the same toolbar set in a maximized view, you have a preference option on Windows to change the UI back to the familiar Acrobat workspace. But this is a Windows only option. Again, the Mac users have been left out. You’re stuck with Acrobat windows detached from the top-level menus and all files appear with individual toolbar sets. I hate this look and it’s made me do ALL my work on my Windows machine. What a pain!
JavaScript Builder
Something else I’ve wanted added to Acrobat is a tool that can help you build JavaScripts. Here we are a good 30+ years since the introduction of the home and business microcomputers and we still have to write cryptic code to produce actions and events. Wouldn’t it be nice to open a window and drag and drop certain items like application alert or application response dialog boxes to a window, set some attributes, click a button and all the JavaScript is automatically created for you? Not so in Acrobat 8. You need to write code in the JavaScript Editor. What a pain.
Adobe LiveCycle Designer
We’ve seen some new additions to Adobe Designer in version 8. You can add PDF Backgrounds, there’s support for importing EPS graphics, a new Table menu has a number of options for creating Tables in a wizard window, you can convert spreadsheets to forms with automatic field recognition, you can distribute forms with enabling features for Reader users, you can customize keyboard shortcuts (a very much needed feature), and more.
What’s left out of Designer? With all the major changes in the UI in Acrobat, Designer is still there with a clunky interface. Being both a design program and a forms creation program, Designer hasn’t given us much in regard to polish for the design phase. You can import PDFs as backgrounds, but you can’t use a grid or snap fields to a grid. The palettes are still overwhelming and a UI like InDesign and GoLive could help free up the overcrowded workspace. What’s really needed for designers who want to create forms is Layers. But you won’t see them in this release. Creating new blank pages is still fixed to a long list of preset page sizes and no options exist for creating a custom page size. Binding fields to data sources is still complex and subform management hasn’t become any easier. The Adobefication of Designer hasn’t yet occurred in version 8.
Also, we still don’t have Designer available on the Mac in version 8.
What can we do?
I’ve made a lot of requests to Adobe engineers during different beta cycles for features and improvements but the engineers don’t usually listen to me because I’m a user of ONE. Adobe tries to satisfy the needs of the many while sometimes at the expense of the needs of the few. I can’t believe I’m alone in some of the features and improvements I want to see in Acrobat and Designer, so I’ve decided to start a new alliance I’m calling the GITMEN alliance —GIVE IT TO ME NOW. Some of us don’t want to wait. We want to see some of the important features needed in Acrobat and Designer as soon as possible.
I’m sure you have some features you’d like to see added to Acrobat that aren’t covered here. Join my GITMEN alliance and post your requests, complaints, and problems here and we’ll see to it that it gets reviewed by some Adobe people. If enough people ask for similar features, it’s quite possible we’ll see these new features added to Acrobat/Designer.
ted
