Adobe Launches Acrobat 7.0 and Adobe Creative Suite 1.3: An Interview With Gray Knowlton

By Cary Sherburne, Senior WTT Editor

November 15, 2004 -- At the recent Print Workflow Summit, a joint venture between Electronic Publishing and WhatTheyThink, Adobe Systems’ Lonn Lorenz, in a session entitled “The Page Layout Giants: Are They Listening?”, asserted that Adobe is listening to its users as it brings new InDesign features and other products to market. He emphasized Adobe’s history of active listening, with a continued strong focus on print but inclusive of the entire infrastructure, from creative to production. Adobe’s announcement today of the launch of Acrobat 7.0 Professional and Adobe Creative Suite 1.3 seems to ratify Lorenz’ assertion. In terms of both features and packaging, these products have taken a giant leap forward in functionality and usability, and have addressed a wide array of user needs. WhatTheyThink spent time with Gray Knowlton, Product Manager, Adobe Acrobat for Creative Professionals, to get the inside scoop on what users can expect to see when Acrobat 7.0 Professional and Adobe Creative Suite 1.3 become available near the end of the calendar year .

WTT: Gray, thanks for taking the time to speak with us. Adobe introduced the Adobe Creative Suite, Standard and Premium Versions, last year. As I understand it, the primary difference between the two is that the Premium Version also includes Acrobat 6.0. How have you done with that offering, and what’s new with Creative Suite 1.3?

GK: The market has responded very enthusiastically. I find it interesting that sales of Premium have outstripped Standard sales by a factor of about three to one, even though Premium costs a little more. That tells me that we are definitely on the right track with the bundling strategy, and with including Acrobat as part of that bundle. With Creative Suite 1.3, we will be offering Acrobat 7.0 as an upgrade to Adobe Creative Suite Premium. So for Adobe Creative Suite users wishing to move to Acrobat 7.0, this upgrade is the way to go.

WTT: We hear a lot about PDF workflows becoming more common in print production environments. Do you have any data that backs up that assumption?

GK: In 2001, the research we were seeing indicated that about 25% of printers were using PDF as a format in production workflow. Today, the research we are getting back from research agencies—and from our own research—tells us that about 90% of printers are accepting PDF as an output file format for print production. So I think those assumptions are absolutely valid. Our goal now is to continue to enhance the product, make it easier to use, and I believe we have addressed some very important uses cases with Acrobat 7.0 Professional. We feel we have come a long way in making it a complete solution for document-based collaboration as well as for print production.

WTT: I know from reading the press release that Acrobat 7.0 Professional contains lots of new stuff. Why don’t you give us an overview of what’s new.

GK: Acrobat 7.0 Professional enables business, technical, and creative professionals to convert a wider variety of documents into Adobe PDF with the touch of a button and assemble them into one comprehensive Adobe PDF file for easy, secure sharing. A really exciting new development is the ability for users to establish a document review process that can include anyone who has Adobe Reader 7.0 software. Adobe Reader 7.0 users can then add comments to Adobe PDF files with intuitive Acrobat review and commenting tools. We’ve set it up so that even an inexperienced user should be able to easily understand the interface. Feedback from multiple reviewers can be easily gathered, tracked, and managed. Performance and security enhancements help make sharing documents faster, easier, more secure, and more flexible.

The other thing we have done, in response to lots of user comments, is dramatically reduce the time it takes to launch the application—both full Acrobat and Reader itself. Depending on the speed of your system, you barely even see the splash screen.

WTT: Those are exciting developments. Will Adobe Reader 7.0 still be free?

GK: Yes, it will, Users will need to download the new version to participate in this collaborative process. And the permissions to participate in this way are granted on an individual document basis, so the document creator has full control of the process.

WTT: What else will we see?

GK: Users with these permissions will also have access to an overprint preview, which allows you to view overprint instructions inside a PDF file on screen so you can see exactly how it is going to print. Versions 5 and 6 had this capability, but Reader did not.

WTT: What about the preflight capabilities referred to in the press release?

GK: This is another very exciting addition to the product. Acrobat 6 had several tools for previewing files to predict where errors might occur. In Acrobat 7.0, you can now actually address some of those issues. New tools let users check for over 400 possible errors, correct printing inks, convert color spaces to CMYK, fix stroke weight problems, and correct other potentially costly errors within the PDF file before the print job goes to press. And you can also establish certain pass/fail criteria for files. For example, you can set Distiller to fail a job if an image resolution is too low. The user can define different preflight “droplets,” which are hot-folder-like icons residing on the desktop that can contain specific preflight settings depending on the source and destination of the job as well as other criteria the printer may want to establish.

WTT: What does this new capability mean for Adobe partners who have developed preflighting plug-ins?

GK: These new tools are similar to functionality that exists in some plug-ins today, but Adobe is still very committed to working with our partners to make them successful. Our purpose in adding these capabilities to Acrobat 7.0 was to address the most common errors people see in the document creation process, with enough functionality in Acrobat so that anyone consuming a document for print production can correct those simple problems without having to go back to the native application.

WTT: I understand there are also some capabilities that help users better manage and organize their Acrobat documents. Tell us a bit about that.

GK: Acrobat 7.0 Professional makes it easier than ever to combine a variety of electronic documents—e-mail, Web pages, spreadsheets, images, and more— into one polished Adobe PDF document for easy sharing and archiving.

For example, with Acrobat 7.0 Professional, Windows users can now convert e-mails or an entire message folder from Microsoft Outlook into Adobe PDF files, enabling the vital information contained in e-mail to be easily shared, archived, or included in combined Adobe PDF documents. The e-mail’s attachments and hyperlinks are automatically retained, and the Adobe PDF files contain bookmarks to the e-mails sorted by sender, date, and subject.

Another productivity enhancer is Organizer. This is available in both Acrobat Standard 7.0 and Professional. Its purpose is to help users manage PDFs that they use frequently. For example, a user could say, “Show me all the PDF files I opened yesterday.” Users can easily display those files, even if they were opened from the Web, since Organizer remembers the URLs. Users can also establish document collections, which is a way of grouping documents that reside in different locations into a catalog type environment for easy access. And documents can display thumbnail previews so it makes it easier to location the right document without actually having to open the PDF file.

WTT: I can see that these capabilities will be helpful to both the creative and production users. Other than the preflighting capabilities, is there anything else you would like to point out as a new capability on the production side?

GK: The other new functionality we introduced to make it much easier for the production side is the ability to actually change the page size in the Acrobat file. This allows the printer to easily accommodate trim and bleed, and even insert the color bar and registration marks. And, of course, Acrobat 7.0 is fully JDF-compliant. You can create JDF intent right from within Acrobat, creating a JDF Job Ticket, as well as create predefined JDF job tickets.

WTT: That’s a lot of new stuff, and I am sure we haven’t even scratched the surface. How can folks find out more?

GK: The Acrobat area of Adobe.com, http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/main.html, has lots of information on the Acrobat family of products and Adobe PDF.

For more information, visit www.adobe.com

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This Interview was conducted by Cary Sherburne. She can be reached via email at cary@sherburneassociates.com, online at www.sherburneassociates.com and by telephone at 603-430-5463.