June 2007

Acrobat 3D Version 8 ships, Acrobat 8.1 & Reader 8.1 available

It's been a newsworthy couple of weeks on the Acrobat front—new products, new OS support, new features, a variety of bug fixes and more. So let's jump in!

In late May, the second generation of Adobe's 3D-savvy member of the family—dubbed Acrobat 3D Version 8—began shipping. According to the company, it's "the desktop application for driving document-based 3D design collaboration and CAD data interoperability capabilities to virtually anyone inside manufacturing organizations and across the global supply chain."

More than 10,000 users participated in the beta and public preview programs for Acrobat 3D Version 8, which is aimed at the needs of engineering, IT professionals and business users in companies of all sizes. It features the ability to create a highly compressed, secure PDF file from virtually any 3D CAD file, maintaining precise geometry. Resulting PDFs can be shared with other Acrobat 3D Version 8 users—and also users equipped with the free, just-released Adobe Reader 8.1, which is required to take advantage of the new Acrobat 3D features and compression format.

Check out our Acrobat 3D Corner for a wealth of additional information, including a Flash-based feature tour, new sample files, three new 3D tutorials, a link to download a free trial version and more. And head for the recently launched forums to share your questions and experiences.

As noted, Adobe released a new version of Reader that not only supports the enhanced 3D PDF features, but also adds improved forms performance and the ability to send a PDF document directly to FedEx Kinko's Print Online for printing (U.S.- and English-only). 

And that's not all!

Released in tandem were patches for updating the latest commercial Professional and Standard products to Acrobat 8.1, adding support for Microsoft Windows Vista (32-bit & 64-bit versions), Microsoft Windows XP with Service Pack 2 (32-bit & 64-bit versions) and Microsoft Office 2007—including one-button PDF file creation. The Mac OS X update features improved support for Adobe Flash files with multimedia—Flash .SWF files will play in Acrobat 8.1 and Reader 8.1  without using Apple's QuickTime player.

You can—and should—access and install the patch by using the Check for Updates feature within Acrobat 8 or by visiting the New Downloads section of Adobe.com.

Best Regards
~ Kurt, Editor, AcrobatUsers.com