With the release of many (if not all) of the Adobe CS3 Packages comes a nice new release of Adobe’s famous PDF creator, Acrobat. Throughout school I became familiar with Adobe Acrobat 7, using it to put together mockups of websites without needing to do any hard coding. Although it took a little while to get used to, once you know your whereabouts in the program it’s fairly easy to use. This is until the release of Acrobat 8.

My initial opinion: Acrobat 8 is a miracle worker. Pulling other files together to make one packaged pdf, it’s so simple and so easy to use; just follow the giant buttons they put in front of you. However, beyond the initial creation of the PDF, Acrobat 8’s features can be difficult to find. Things like bookmarking and paging are still very simple, but more complicated interactive features such as linking pages through buttons are far more difficult to locate. Is the easy initial set up worth the wall of confusion once the pdf is sewn? The difference between versions 7 and 8 are worlds apart. I suppose all of us with experience with prior versions will have to do something no one ever wants to do….read the manual.

Besides the bit of confusion, overall the facelift which Acrobat received was a fairly nice one. A user with little experience of sewing files into pdfs will find this program very friendly and easy to use.