Adobe Acrobat

Adobe Acrobat is a family of computer programs developed by Adobe Systems, designed to view, create, manipulate and manage files in Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF)^[1]. Some software in the family is commercial, and some is freeware. Adobe Reader (formerly Acrobat Reader) is available as a no-charge download from Adobe's web site, and allows the viewing and printing of PDF files.^[2] Acrobat and Reader are widely used as a way to present information with a fixed layout similar to a paper publication.

History

Since the early 1990s, the Acrobat product had several competitors who each used their own document formats, such as:

By the late 1990s PDF had become the de facto standard, and the others had become largely historical footnotes. This in turn has led to many more competitors for Adobe Acrobat, both free and commercial.

Today, there are a host of third-party programs that create or manipulate PDF, such as Ghostscript, Foxit, and Nitro PDF. Adobe also allows Acrobat plug-ins to be developed by third parties, which can add extra functions within the Acrobat program.

Product names

Adobe has changed the names of the products in the Acrobat family regularly, also splitting products up, joining them together, or discontinuing members. This causes much confusion, not only about what product to obtain, but even about what product people have. Between version 3 and 5, Standard and Professional versions were one product simply called Adobe Acrobat.

Adobe has never created a product called either Adobe Writer or Acrobat Writer, although these names seem a natural opposite to the Reader product. Adding more confusion, Acrobat used to include a printer driver called PDFWriter, which is unrelated.

Product history

Acrobat Reader 1.0 for Macintosh was originally released 15 June 1993, later for DOS and Windows 3.1. This was not available in single copies and was not initially free. After a while the IRS purchased a right to distribute Reader 1.0, effectively making it seem free to those who obtained it that way:

Acrobat Reader 2.0 for Windows and Macintosh was first released September 1994. It is now available free of charge:

Acrobat Reader 3.0 was released 1996. The first to display PDF files in-browser, and the first to support form filling:

Adobe Reader 6.0 was released April 2003. No Linux or Unix versions were released:

Adobe Acrobat 9.0 was announced officially in June 2008 for availability in July 2008: ^[8] ^[9]

Internationalization and localization

Language Availability

Adobe Acrobat is available in the following languages: Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian. Arabic, Hebrew and Greek versions available from WinSoft ^[11] Adobe Systems’ Internationalization and localization partner.

Specific Features for Arabic and Hebrew languages

The Arabic and Hebrew versions are specifically developed for these specific languages, which are normally written right-to-left.

TouchUp

Adobe Acrobat Arabic and Hebrew versions come with special TouchUp properties to handle the needs of Middle Eastern languages, such as Arabic or Hindi digits, ligatures option, paragraph direction.

Search/Find

Adobe Acrobat Arabic and Hebrew versions propose a Search setting in PDF Documents, Bookmarks, Notes and other Comments to do accurate searches sensitive to Middle Eastern characters.

Copy/Paste

With Adobe Acrobat Arabic and Hebrew versions you can re-use Arabic and Hebrew texts from a PDF file, as you do with English texts. The Arabic/Hebrew text is transferred to the application as text, and will be displayed correctly if the application is able to handle correctly the Arabic or Hebrew script.

Web Capture

Adobe Acrobat Arabic and Hebrew versions allow you to easily convert Middle Eastern Web pages or entire sites to Adobe PDF files with all links intact for offline viewing and archiving using special encoding for languages of Middle Eastern Regions.

Criticisms

From Version 3.02 onwards, Acrobat Reader (now Adobe Reader) has included support for JavaScript. This functionality allows the document creator to include code which executes when the document is read. While JavaScript is designed without direct access to the file system to make it "safe", vulnerabilities have been reported for abuses such as distributing malicious code through Acrobat.^[12] On September 13, 2006, David Kierznowski provided sample PDF files illustrating these vulnerabilities. In the most current version of Reader, JavaScript can be disabled using the preferences menu and embedded URLs that are launched are intercepted by a security warning dialog box to either allow or block the website from launching.^[13]

There have been a number of people who consider the software to be too slow to load and use,^[14] so they have developed workaround solutions to speed up the software.^[15] The application has been improved by Adobe as the latest version of the software does load quicker; Adobe claims that Adobe Reader 7 users can "Open and save PDF files faster than ever" as version 7.0 launches "up to 50% faster than version 6.0".^[16] This works by installing a QuickStart program which runs every time the computer is turned on, and which loads parts of Reader into memory. This can improve the loading speed of Reader, but also uses up memory resources on the computer and causes longer system start-up times.

Many have also noted poor behavior in the Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox Acrobat plug-ins. The plug-ins do not support full asynchronous loading, thus causing browsers to appear to "lock up" until the document has been fully downloaded. To make matters worse, they apparently also fail to terminate when a document is closed, thereby leaving behind various CPU-intensive application threads that run until the next reboot.^[17] In Adobe Reader 8, Acrobat no longer support opening opening PDF within browser window, eliminating a use of browser plug-in that causes the perceived lock up.

There is currently no official option to stop Reader 8 from Phoning home. Furthermore, the "Updates" Preference in Reader 8 has been moved from "Edit | Preferences" to a different location. It can be found at "Help | Check for updates | Preferences", where one can choose "Automatic" or "Ask me before downloading", and "Weekly" or "Monthly". Note that "Adobe Reader 8" can be unchecked for "Applications to Update"; however, that will not stop it from checking for updates. Instead it will respond "No updates available" even if updates are available. Other than this, there is no official way to stop program from downloading updates every time you open Adobe Acrobat. Many Windows users have had success with the unofficial method of deleting the folder C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Updater5.^{citation needed} Alternatively, renaming the updater DLL also stops Adobe Reader from checking updates.

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