Adobe Acrobat 8.0: Still a Force in Print Design and Publishing

The system wasn’t successful, not least because opening the locked PDFs proved chancey. I have a couple of PDFs I bought during Amazon’s experiment selling them which, on opening, download a lot of “verification information” and then give inscrutable errors. The ability for publishers to lock down the PDFs that Amazon (for example) sold with DRM 'Adobe Acrobat 8.0' provided the key to this problem.

PDF has been presented as being a suitable format for electronic books, but Adobe Acrobat remains an enormous force in the world of print design. While it’s not quite as ubiquitous as it once was – newer programs like Adobe InDesign, for example, let designers create PDFs that can be sent to the printer without bothering with Acrobat, and it’s easy to make PDFs out of anything in Mac OS X – this is very important in the world of print design and publishing: probably 90% of the new printed material you see every day goes through Adobe Acrobat in some form or another.

Adobe Acrobat is the “author” program: it lets people make PDFs. What does Adobe Acrobat have to do with electronic books? You’re probably familiar with Adobe Reader: it’s the program that opens up PDFs. As an author, I was excited to see what glimmers might be discerned about the future of electronic reading. To promote it, Adobe hosted three “webinars” on Tuesday to demonstrate some of the new features to the interested public.

Recently, Adobe just announced the release of Adobe Acrobat 8, their PDF production software. With this latest version, Adobe is further solidifying its position as a leader in the world of print design and publishing, while also offering exciting new possibilities for electronic book creators.

Adobe acrobat 8.0