Adobe Acrobat made its first appearance in 1991, while its PDF file format, from the start, was designed as multiplatform electronic communication instrument. Appearance of Internet had significant influence on future development of this format, thereby forcing Adobe to make even better tool, which in time will become one of dominate methods of data exchange on the Net, but at the same time they had to keep their role in professional printing domain.
Version 8 of this program wasn’t so impressive, and it seemed that Acrobat has run out of steam. However, version 9 showed that Adobe attempts to inbreathe new life into Acrobat, which is clearly shown by implementing support for Flash based content, as well as integrating it with Acrobat.com Web services. Acrobat embraced incoming Internet era with an open heart!
With Macromedia Inheritance
Brand new life of Adobe Acrobat is best shown through implementation of new functions in all aspects PDF documents. Integration with Flash technology allowed Acrobat to abandon its roots and static ePaper technology. Previous version of Acrobat already supported implementation of SWF (Flash) content, but its reproduction was dependent of weather users had a Flash player installed on the computer or not. After taking-over of Macromedia, Adobe was capable of integrating Flash player into Adobe Reader, so this universal and reliable system for multimedia content delivery became integral part of Acrobat platform.
Welfare of integrated Flash in version 9 is obvious in Acrobat’s way of handling video material. This was inevitable since video became omnipresent, due to large spectrum of digital devices with video capabilities. Now, thanks to Flash, Acrobat can handle this kind of multimedia content, practically as easy as it handles pictures. However, a little problem occurred because Flash can support exclusively its own, Web optimized, FLV video format. This requires conversion of video into FLV format, and Acrobat 9 Pro delivers necessary tools for that conversion. This video tool allows importing of wide range of video formats, including AVI, MOV, WMV and MPEG. Subsequently, Acrobat 9 converts video material into FLV format, extracts one frame, chosen by user, which then represents video icon on PDF page, and packs it all up in Flash based player.
Acrobat’s video tool makes PDF documents more attractive, but to fully emphasize Flash support, customized design environment is necessary. Without any doubts, next Adobe Creative Suite will support these features with Embed Video and Convert to Flash commands. This will result in, for example, export of new generation PDF format files with video material from InDesign and Premiere.
For now, Adobe added support for main Microsoft Office applications to fill in the gaps with “Embed Video” and “Convert to Flash” commands, until new Adobe Creative Site is published. Acrobat can work with most popular applications: MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Outlook and Internet Explorer as it did before version 9.
