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Reviews
@ Applelust
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Adobe
Acrobat 5
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Ratings Legend
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One Bounce: Lustless
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This product is uninspiring and not only lacks lust
appeal, but it also lacks even the possibility of lust-production.
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Two Bounces: Lack-Luster
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If you need what it is that this product does, look
elsewhere or wait, it lacks lust-appeal.
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Three Bounces: Lustworthy
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A few rough spots here and there, but overall a high
quality item worthy of lust.
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Four Bounces: Pure Lust
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Unalloyed lust.
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In reviewing Acrobat 5, I decided to
take a very different approach from previous reviews.
Acrobat is not exactly a stand — alone
product, as most designers use it in combination with
other design software to produce portable (meaning
small and press ready) documents. Theoretically, you
would "print" a Quark (or Illustrator/ InDesign/
PageMaker/ Word/ Freehand/ etc) file as a PDF that
could be distributed to a printer with the proper
set of colors, graphics, typefaces and layout ready
to be printed on a professional press. Theoretically.
The reality of Acrobat 4 was that you
got mostly press-ready PDFs all of the time or completely
press — ready PDFs most of the time,
but never all press-ready all of the
time. I'm not going to go into the process that Acrobat
4 used to create PDFs — I'd honestly
just as soon forget it.
Acrobat 5 seems to have seriously streamlined
the PDF creation process. I've been terribly happy
with the PDFs I created for press with Acrobat 5,
but decided to try a real test —
have my students prepare their PDFs for press using
Acrobat 5.
The Acid Test
A group of my students participate in
an in-house Ad Agency called Studio Blue here at our
mysterious "Midwestern Jesuit School." They
are getting some very good "worst case scenario"
experience when it comes to dealing with the campus
print shop — which uses an NT (say
what?) workstation with no installed fonts other than
Windows system fonts, no design software, and no technical
support — which is somewhat less
than ideal when it comes to servicing design projects.
They do, however, have Acrobat.
I had them create posters for Studio
Blue in Acrobat 5 to see how'd they would take it
to it. This is as much as real-world as one can get
without being in the real-world! The posters the students
prepare are all 11x17 inches with 1-4 colors, lots
of type, and no bleed. This makes it very easy to
set up a file incorrectly, especially when they are
trying to hit a morning deadline and spend the entire
night laying out type. I figured the Acid Test (hopefully
not increasing the amount of acid eating away at my
stomach lining) would be to allow these students access
to my computer through a network for final PDF output
from Quark and Freehand.
After about 5 minutes of training
— the experiment had begun. I went
to my QuickSilver to see what they would produce.
Would they be able to just pick up Acobat 5 and produce
quality PDFs with less errors? That had had trouble
doing it with version 4 in the past; in fact many
students were lost and couldn't figure out why some
aspect of the PDF was messed up after all their work.
I took the normal graphic designer route
to setting up Acrobat. I need to get back to work
right away, so install, screw the manual, and figure
it out on the fly. After installation, I noticed a
new icon had appeared in my chooser called "AdobePS."
Since Acrobat 4 placed a PDFwriter icon in the chooser,
I knew to look there first. Acrobat is a bit odd in
the sense that normally you never have to open the
software in order to create a file.
I selected the AdobePS icon, and proceeded
to set up my HP LaserJet printer to use this driver.
I was pretty happy that this worked, since my HPLaserJet
printer icon never did work right, and caused crashes
about 50% of the time — which have
since ceased to be a problem.
After selecting the chooser icon, I
was ready to make some PDFs. I jumped into Quark,
and began goofing around with a layout. After the
layout was ready, complete with special fonts, transparent
vector graphics, rasterized graphics, and PMS colors,
I brought up the printing dialogue in Quark.
I was now able to choose Acrobat Distiller
from the list of printers in the Quark "setup"
tag, instead of the HP LaserJet I normally use (no
extra prep — a PPD is placed in the
System's Printer Descriptions in installation).
Then, clicking the page setup button
at the bottom of the Quark print setup dialog, I got
an additional menu allowing me to choose "Create
Adobe PDF" as the target printer instead of the
LaserJet and saved my changes.
Finally, knowing there were more buttons
begging me to push them, I pressed the "Printer..."
button in the Quark print setup and selected "Press"
as my job option since the file was destined for a
professional printer as a 2 color postcard.
When I saved this configuration, I
was given a menu to select a final name and folder
to save the finished PDF.
I then pressed the Print button and
a few minutes later, a PDF magically appeared on my
desktop. Cool, but would it actually make a press-ready
PDF?
The Acid Test proved to be a winner.
My test PDF sailed through the press, and 6
Studio Blue jobs had no problems printing. Two additional
posters, however, were finalized in Acrobat 4, and
had major problems — missing fonts,
really jacked up graphics, and transparency that was
not entirely transparent. This shows that there has
been major improvements in Acrobat 5 in creating and
distilling PDFs. But all in all, it only took five
minutes of training with the students in Acrobat 5
to get good results. True, they are design students
and not normal Joes and Janes. But that's the point,
since Acrobat is a professional level program that
designers use. They had a much harder time with Acrobat
4, but Acrobat 5 was intuitive and easy enough for
them to jump right into and produce printable PDFs
in a hurry. And of course, it saves me time as a teacher
because I don't have to spend as much time explaining
Acrobat to them and correcting mistakes.
Acrobat 5 proved itself a winner in
the portable graphics test.
Raiding the Web
Acrobat 5 does have other features and
applications, such as Distiller for converting postscript
files to PDF that work just fine (and rarely get used
by folks like me). A feature that raised many eyebrows
is Acrobat's ability to download web pages and convert
them to PDF format, complete with graphics, links
and fonts.
Early on when I tried this, Acrobat seemed
to not understand CSS formatting, and any page with
CSS fonts and backgrounds went a little berserk when
"captured" to a PDF. Out of curiosity, since
Acrobat is constantly downloading new updates, I tried
it again today. Although the page looks considerably
different, the font size is fairly consistent with the
page, and looks
pretty decent.
I'm pretty impressed with Acrobat 5
— its very easy to use, makes good
PDFs, and Adobe shows they are committed to upgrading
the software to work with evolving web standards.
The Verdict
Perfect 4 out of 4 bounces, with no
reservations. This is must-have software for anyone
working in print design. It simplifies workflow and
produces good results quickly. It will save both designers
and printers many hours, and provide audiences with
quality PDFs.
Joel
Davies
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