subject: Best Software! Adobe Acrobat X Full Review! [print this page] In many ways Acrobat and Adobe's PDF format are even more insurmountable. Microsoft tried with their XPS format, which hasn't exactly set the world on fire. Despite the fact that security holes pop up in Adobe software -- especially in the PDF format -- at an alarming rate, it is nonetheless pervasive. PDF files are used for documentation for a broad range of software. PDF files are frequently a default format available for scanners, oftentimes without even needing to boot into an operating system. Unlike Photoshop -- which serves a specific user base -- and Windows -- which does have to contend with Mac OS X and Linux -- Adobe's PDF format is simply inescapable. It is on every platform. It is readable on smartphones.
You can see why one might wonder if Adobe even has the impetus to improve it, and you can see why updates have been...rarefied. Acrobat Pro belongs in Adobe's Creative Suite -- it's strange that it isn't included in CS5 -- but Acrobat X is more than a little late. What does it bring to the table?
We'll start with the free one. Right off the bat, I can tell you that from the looks of things, the newest version of Adobe Reader is business as usual. New features compared to old Adobe Reader 9 seem spare; the same commenting and embedding is all accounted for. The user interface appears a little bit cleaned up; as we'll see, it's mostly falling in line with Acrobat X Pro, which in turn is falling in line with the rest of Adobe's Creative Suite 5.
There is one important difference I've noticed with Reader X against the venerable Reader 9: it at least feels a bit faster. When Reader X is launched it produces two processes, one of which hovers at around 6MB of memory usage -- hardly noteworthy -- and the other closer to 60-80MB. Scrolling through documents in Reader X seems quicker and as a whole the program feels lighter, and that's a good thing: Adobe Reader has traditionally felt very bloated, and scrolling has often felt like a chore. In Reader X, that's less of a problem.
