The next version of Adobe Acrobat, set for release in November, has several new features that will be of specific interest to AEC firms. Most users think of Acrobat as just one of many possible tools to create a PDF file, and they limit their thinking to the creation of an electronic document. By contract, Adobe is putting a heavy emphasis in this release on establishing Acrobat as a collaboration product that uses both Adobe PDF and Flash in a larger workflow.
Flash is a popular interactive graphics environment used on many websites. Flash came to Adobe via the purchase of Macromedia last year. Flash will be the technology behind Adobe Acrobat Connect, a hosted software service that provides immediate access to a personal online meeting room for real-time web conferencing. Disperse teams will be able to easily set up web meetings for the specific purpose of jointly reviewing documents published as PDF files. Adobe claims that Flash technology is already installed on 98% of Internet-enabled desktops, making it easy to extend the technology into a tool for team collaboration.
In addition to adding real-time collaboration, current AEC Acrobat users will notice that Adobe has put considerable effort into improving the speed of working with design files. Adobe says that an AutoCAD drawing that took 140 seconds to publish to PDF in Acrobat 7 will only take six seconds in Acrobat 8. Adobe says their research indicated that customers who publish drawings were more interested in fast publishing than small file sizes. This means we can expect the competitive tension between Adobe’s PDF and Autodesk’s DWF to continue, as Autodesk will still be able to champion its ability to drastically compress drawings. But in this age of near-universal high bandwidth and large hard drives in professional environments, I have to wonder about the relevance of such competitive tension.
Adobe introduces the concept of the PDF package in this release. For AEC users, the main benefit of publishing PDF files as a package is the ability to preserve digital signatures. It will also be possible to digitally sign a document using the free Adobe Acrobat 8 Reader, if the capability is turned on by the Acrobat 8 Professional user who created the PDF. A PDF package can also contain sortable columns of metadata, and various additional fields can be added that were not part of the original documents.
Other new features coming with Acrobat 8 include:
- Drag-and-drop conversion: It will be possible to drag an AutoCAD drawing to Acrobat for conversion to PDF without having a copy of AutoCAD on the computer. This will eliminate the need for a copy of AutoCAD where the only purpose is to review plots.
- Support for AutoCAD sheet sets in a PDF, to convert and combine as needed.
- AutoCAD DWG model space can now be added to a PDF as an option.
- Batch conversion of drawing files to a PDF.
- Users will be able to interrogate the contents of DWG files for combining into a PDF. Users will be able to arrange the order of documents, and to choose to emphasize file size or file quality when publishing to PDF, or to balance the two factors.
- Adobe says it has updated all drawing primitives, improved the measurement capabilities and increased the functionality of the review and markup tools.
Adobe Acrobat 3D will ship by February 2007. I will write an overview of its new features in a separate article.
--RSN