This isn’t to suggest that the changes to PDF file writing and evaluation are insignificant - and I will cover those changes in the section below called “Enhanced and New Print-Production Features” - but they don’t turn heads.
With Acrobat 9 Professional, and the sister Acrobat Reader 9, Adobe has left well enough alone and modestly enhanced the basics of this 15-year-old workhorse product: enhanced color conversion, Overprint preview, better preflighting, layer control, etc. Yes, print shops still need to fix or tweak customer PDFs, but for the most part the PDF files churned out by page-layout and other applications do what they’re supposed to do. And it felt like we were reaching that point with PDF. The ultimate measure of success for an open standard such as PDF is that it becomes so pervasive you no longer need anything special to make it work.
Pros: PDF portfolio creation, Flash support, better color conversions, highly accurate document comparison feature, layers.Ĭons: Out of cycle with Creative Suite upgrade, it’s a big (almost 1 GB) application, and many new features will only be practical when Acrobat Readers are upgraded over time.
