Adobe Acrobat 6.0 Professional Upgrade

Combine multiple documents—including large-format technical drawings and page layouts—into one compact Adobe PDF file in a single step. Automatically initiate and manage document reviews using intuitive electronic tools. Create forms that can be exchanged with colleagues and customers, and archive your project files as searchable Adobe PDF files.

View, navigate, and comment on large-format documents with tools that eliminate the need for paper-based reviews, making it faster and easier to meet critical deadlines. Streamline proofing cycles with robust tools that let you automatically track, manage, and incorporate electronic feedback. View detailed artwork or large-format documents with intuitive navigation tools. Output PDF/X-compliant files, and help eliminate surprises at the printer by preflighting files and previewing and printing color separations.

Note: This is an upgrade version.

What the importance of this particular upgrade amounts to is the few operations that have been made easier (working in conjuction with AutoCAD, etc.). But the all around use of the program is essentially unchanged. Do your research first.


Intrusive and Slow   June 24, 2003
R. A. Levien (Lexington, MA USA)
97 out of 99 found this review helpful

Be warned: this latest release of Acrobat continues Adobe's aggressive trend of intruding into your desktop environment, this time without providing an easy way to undo the damage once its done. Like earlier releases, this version of Acrobat adds startup macros and new toolbar buttons to your existing applications and adds menu entries to your desktop "right click" menus. Adobe argues that these are conveniences, but they are entirely unnecessary (for most of us "printing" to Adobe PDF achieves the same result, is much more convenient, and a more natural model), and clutter what for most users is either a too-crowded user interface (for those who don't have the knowledge or patience to customize it) or a carefully tuned one (for those who do). Unlike many well-behaved applications that provide obvious ways of avoiding this kind of intrusive and disruptive behavior (e.g. through a simple checkbox option in a settings dialog), Acrobat's "option" for disabling this behavior are deeply hidden in the setup process. To disable the "Convert to Adobe PDF" button that mysteriously appears in the Outlook mail editor, for example, one has to be sure to choose "this feature will not be available" from the "Microsoft Outlook" option under "Acrobat PDFMaker" under "Create Adobe PDF". Simply deleting the button using Outlook's toolbar customization feature will not work: it comes right back when the editor is next opened. Similar problems arise in Word, Excel, Visio, Project, and Internet Explorer. And there's simply no way to get rid of the never-used "Convert to Adobe PDF" and "Combine in Acrobat..." entries in that appear in the desktop context menus for files (even if one installs none of the Acrobat PDFMaker features).

In short, Acrobat will make a mess of your working environment, there's no way to completely fix it, and even the partial fix is a pain (and not well documented). (This may seem a minor issue, but if every application followed Adobe's reckless example, our working environments would start to look like strip malls, crowded with features screaming for our attention to the point where it is hard to find what we need when we need it. One of the great strengths of the personal computer desktop is that users can configure it in ways that suit their needs; no application should interfere with that.)

Experienced Acrobat users will also notice that this version continues another frustrating trend for Acrobat (and most other Adobe applications): it is yet again slower to launch than the previous version. In fact, on my 2 GHz Pentium 4, it takes longer to launch than the entire Visual Studio .NET development environment, and longer than the boot sequence for Windows XP!

There are other minor problems as well (arbitrary rearrangements of menu and tool bar items, etc.) but these two major flaws are more than bad enough. Unless you really need the latest Acrobat features, you should probably avoid this upgrade. And if the "improvements" in this release are any indication of where Adobe plans to go with future releases, it may be time to start looking elsewhere for a tool for digital document management.


Really a mess   January 13, 2005
Kimba W. Lion (the East Coast)
48 out of 49 found this review helpful

It's obvious that Adobe feels safe and entrenched as THE maker of PDF creation software, because Acrobat installs like a herd of elephants moving in to your computer. It completely re-worked my MS Word toolbars and would not allow me to restore them the way I want them. (Even after un-installation, there is still something at work against my normal.dot template.) Other applications felt the impact, too. All I want is a way to make PDF files, not a new lifestyle.

Unfortunately, Acrobat 6 could not deliver the PDF files for me. On a P4, 1.8 Ghz system, I allowed it to process my Word document for 5 hours before I gave up and had to get some real work done. I went and found activePDF Composer, which handled the same Word file and delivered my PDF file in just 10 minutes.

Get over yourself, Adobe.


Missed the Point   April 25, 2003
46 out of 66 found this review helpful

OK. You shell out your money and purchase Adobe promising your web customers they can painlessly complete forms while on-line. You spend hours - days - months - converting your forms. Then learn you have just wasted your time. Customers can complete the on-line form and even send them to you, but they can not save a copy of their completed form to their C: drive unless they too own a full version of Adobe Acrobat! ...


Nice, only for the refined search function....bye indexing..   June 8, 2003
Leonard Dahlke (Oakland, CA)
46 out of 51 found this review helpful

The caveats are, have a FAST computer and wait for the major patch that is probably coming soon. Its dreadfully slow on any MAC below 600mhz. Large document manipulation is laughable. The interface redesign is great but the looks dont cover up the fact that it feels sluggish and bloated......what is it with the "save as" function being so slow.....and I mean SLOW!!!!!

I have some issues with Adobe's/Acrobat's all over the map development. One minute its for maintaining a documents integrity, the next its for collaborative review of documents. Then its for printing professionals to deliver burnable files to printing agencies....

Great product but all over the map as far as how Adobe is developing it.

I'm currently involved in a project using Acrobat in creating legal documents for an impending trial. We use Acrobat HEAVILY to say the least. And I can honestly say that Adobe needs to work on a few upgrade items to make it suitable for business needs. A much more lucrative market in the long run.

1. Extractable Bookmarks: It is such a pain to extract pages and have to recreate the bookmark structure manually all over again. When you've done this for the millionth time you are pretty much convinced its a function inexcusably lacking. BTW-this upgrade does not provide the feature.

2. Printing of a documents page structure in relation to bookmarks: It would be wonderful to print or view the bookmarks in relation to the pages they map to. This would verify a logical chronology within the document vs having to literally click each bookmark to verify its link. They provide mapping views in programs like Dreamweaver or Frontpage. This seem like such a no brainer to include in Acrobat.

3. Extraction of groups of documents that are not synchronus. Currently you can only extract documents that are in order. This makes for very slow going when it comes to compilling and arranging "unique" new documents.

The paperless office is a long way away and Adobe made a wonderful step in that direction when it created Acrobat. However their development path has become a comedy of immediate gratification errors. They have the awesome interface, have made it astonishly simple to use....but why has no one from Adobe made an effort to approach industries, businesses, et al to research what their document needs are.? I somehow bet that Adobe is paying some idiot analyst research firm to confirm their (presupposed) notion that Acrobat is best used in the realm of the print professional vs the business environment at large. Short sighted needs being met vs mirroring the inspired leap that made Acrobat truly unique in the first place.

If you are going to bloat out Acrobat why not make it a word processing, layout program suited for business. Maintaining document integrity yet creating a defacto standard when it comes to a truely editable, searchable, PAPERLESS office.

Adobe gets some of the picture but they have fallen sadly short over the past few years. Once visionaries they are now satisfied attending Sybold and thinking that everyone out here is a graphics geek professional. No overt attempts at creating a product that rivals the unique and forward thinking paradim shift that Acrobat could have been developed into. They are now a corporate mill, set on satisfying stock holders and content to reap rewards in roulette wheel fashion. Meanwhile ignoring what compelled them to be unique and revolutionary in the first place.

Final Analysis? Better interface, searchable Bookmarks. But wait before you buy, 6.5 may be the version to hold out for. If you currently own 5.0 it'll be fine til the fixes for 6.0 start cropping up!