subject: The Top 10 What's New and Improved in Acrobat X [print this page] The Top 10 What's New and Improved in Acrobat X
Acrobat X has been out for several months now, and I figured it was worth while to give you a look into the new and improved features for the program. You can do the same if you want to download a trial of the program from the Adobe website (there is only a Windows trial at the time of this article's publication).
A lot of work went into the making of Acrobat X, and it shows in the final product. Just to prove to you that a lot went into it, you can read about it here on the . Guess how many hours the team spent on Acrobat X? Try 5 million.
Along with the new version of Acrobat (including Acrobat X Standard and Pro), Adobe has created a new Acrobat X Suite, which is a bundle of products including Acrobat X Pro, Photoshop CS5, Captivate 5, Presenter 7, LiveCycle Designer ES2, and Media Encoder CS5. This suite is meant for those of us who probably don't own a Creative Suite already and are looking for a set of tools to create dynamic PDF files for circulation, where the sky is the limit, creatively.
So, without further ado, I'd like to take you on a tour of these new and improved features in Acrobat X ).
#1: A Brand New Interface
If you've worked in previous versions of Acrobat, the first thing you may notice after opening Acrobat X is that the interface is drastically different. At first look, I was shocked to see that the menus had all but disappeared. But after opening a PDF and taking a look around the workspace, I realized that the interface has simply been streamlined and simplified (see video tutorials). The most commonly used panels appear in a Tools pane on the right side of the workspace. So, things like creating forms, commenting, security, and more can easily be found.
Figure 1 The new Acrobat X workspace
After the initial shock wore off and I began traversing the new workspace, I started to wonder where some of the tools I used to use in previous versions of Acrobat now reside. Well, a few clicks into Acrobat Help (Help > Adobe Acrobat X Pro Help), I was able to find a section entitled "Where's my Acrobat 9 tool?" Help stated, "Acrobat 9 menu commands and tools map to the panels in the Acrobat X panes. To add all panels to the Tools pane, click the Options menu under the Share panel and choose a deselected panel from the list." (See )
Figure 2 Where are my Acrobat 9 tools?
You can also quickly access the tools you use most by adding them to the Quick Tools area in the Toolbar at the top of the workspace (see . So, instead of digging through panels or wading through multiple toolbars, you can customize the Toolbar to match your work style.
