Customer Reviews

Adobe Acrobat 6.0 Professional [OLD VERSION]

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

Be warned: this latest release of Acrobat continues Adobe's aggressive trend of intruding into your desktop environment, this time without providing an easy way to undo the damage once its done. Like earlier releases, this version of Acrobat adds startup macros and new toolbar buttons to your existing applications and adds menu entries to your desktop "right click" menus. Adobe argues that these are conveniences, but they are entirely unnecessary (for most of us "printing" to Adobe PDF achieves the same result, is much more convenient, and a more natural model), and clutter what for most users is either a too-crowded user interface (for those who don't have the knowledge or patience to customize it) or a carefully tuned one (for those who do). Unlike many well-behaved applications that provide obvious ways of avoiding this kind of intrusive and disruptive behavior (e.g. through a simple checkbox option in a settings dialog), Acrobat's "option" for disabling this behavior are deeply hidden in the setup process. To disable the "Convert to Adobe PDF" button that mysteriously appears in the Outlook mail editor, for example, one has to be sure to choose "this feature will not be available" from the "Microsoft Outlook" option under "Acrobat PDFMaker" under "Create Adobe PDF". Simply deleting the button using Outlook's toolbar customization feature will not work: it comes right back when the editor is next opened. Similar problems arise in Word, Excel, Visio, Project, and Internet Explorer. And there's simply no way to get rid of the never-used "Convert to Adobe PDF" and "Combine in Acrobat..." entries in that appear in the desktop context menus for files (even if one installs none of the Acrobat PDFMaker features).

In short, Acrobat will make a mess of your working environment, there's no way to completely fix it, and even the partial fix is a pain (and not well documented). (This may seem a minor issue, but if every application followed Adobe's reckless example, our working environments would start to look like strip malls, crowded with features screaming for our attention to the point where it is hard to find what we need when we need it. One of the great strengths of the personal computer desktop is that users can configure it in ways that suit their needs; no application should interfere with that.)

Experienced Acrobat users will also notice that this version continues another frustrating trend for Acrobat (and most other Adobe applications): it is yet again slower to launch than the previous version. In fact, on my 2 GHz Pentium 4, it takes longer to launch than the entire Visual Studio .NET development environment, and longer than the boot sequence for Windows XP!

There are other minor problems as well (arbitrary rearrangements of menu and tool bar items, etc.) but these two major flaws are more than bad enough. Unless you really need the latest Acrobat features, you should probably avoid this upgrade. And if the "improvements" in this release are any indication of where Adobe plans to go with future releases, it may be time to start looking elsewhere for a tool for digital document management.

It's obvious that Adobe feels safe and entrenched as THE maker of PDF creation software, because Acrobat installs like a herd of elephants moving in to your computer. It completely re-worked my MS Word toolbars and would not allow me to restore them the way I want them. (Even after un-installation, there is still something at work against my normal.dot template.) Other applications felt the impact, too. All I want is a way to make PDF files, not a new lifestyle.

Unfortunately, Acrobat 6 could not deliver the PDF files for me. On a P4, 1.8 Ghz system, I allowed it to process my Word document for 5 hours before I gave up and had to get some real work done. I went and found activePDF Composer, which handled the same Word file and delivered my PDF file in just 10 minutes.

Get over yourself, Adobe.

Unfortunately it looks like Adobe released Acrobat 6 too early. There are quite a few bugs and problems with no fixes yet. In general the program operates much slower than Acrobat 5. The main problem many users, including myself, presently have with Acrobat 6 is that we can not import a scan from our scanners. Some scanners work, but many do not (including most if not all HP USB scanners, and many other manufacturer USB scanners). There is presently no fix for the problem. I needed to be able to scan images into acrobat, so I had to temporarily uninstall Acrobat 6 and downgrade myself to Acrobat 5 until the problems are worked out. Adobe does not provide any time frame when a service pack to fix this problem will be made available. I suggest that potential buyers examine the Adobe users forum to see the many problems people are encountering with Acrobat 6... My suggestion is to wait until Adobe works out the problems in this version before you purchase it. They are a good company, so I know they will eventually get to fixing all the problems. Those of us who paid the money for the software already are stuck waiting for this to happen. In my case, the software is essentially useless until this happens. Good luck, if you decide to get it now. In my opinion, Adobe just released this one too eary. Hopefully next time they will test it first.

At my business we are required to scan things to PDF documents to send to our clients. I love the PDF format. It is a great way to easily condense documents into small file sizes while still maintaining quality. It's unfortunate that I haven't found a way to create PDF without going through Adobe first. As the IT guy in our office, Acrobat problems is the biggest thing I get called about. This is the most bloated invasive software I have ever used, even more so than some spyware I've seen. It installs itself EVERYWHERE.

I have an Acrobat icon in Microsoft Word, which seems convenient for converting documents from Word to PDF, but it places the toolbar below all the other toolbars, when it only contains three buttons, taking up valuable screen space. It took me hours to find a way to remove it because it kept coming back when I would try to disable it manually. Acrobat will install toolbars everywhere that are difficult to remove, it will add "convenient" convert to pdf options on all your right click boxes, it will reside itself in your system memory and keep itself always on, it will add itself to your quick tray icons, and then it will come to your house, eat your food, and hit on your wife.

Acrobat created problems on our computers that could only be resolved by reinstalling Acrobat. That is fine I guess, however uninstalling Acrobat does not completely remove it. I used their uninstall program, and still found over 100 instances of Acrobat left in my system registry. Acrobat still had a program left in my memory that was causing problems after I uninstalled it. This program installed over 300 keys in my system registry! Lastly, this program constantly has trouble detecting our scanners. We use Acrobat to scan on over 15 computers and we constantly have to unplug our scanners and have plug and plug reinstall them so Acrobat can find them.

I love PDF documents, and their "Print to PDF" feature is very useful for converting things to PDF, but as a whole, the Acrobat software is the worst software I've ever used from a large company, and I eagerly await the day when another company makes an easier to use PDF program that can be used for scanning.

I downloaded an evaluation copy of Acrobat 6 before I read the reviews here. I can confirm what others are saying: unlike the upgrade from 4.0 to 5.0, 6.0 doesn't offer the average user additional usefulness over 5.0.

It's also much slower to load and takes twice as long to creat .pdf files. The interface is completely different, so there will be a steep learning curve for users upgrading from previous editions. Sometimes, software developers just screw one up, and this one is such an upgrade.

Pay close attention to the features you need: If you just want to print files to .pdf, you don't need all the stuff 6.0 offers. You'll never use 80% of the features they've added.

After one day, I got frustrated, realized I didn't have the time to learn an entirely new piece of software so that I could simply continue to make .pdf files, and uninstalled it.

Lesson learned: Check for reviews FIRST.

I spoke with Adobe today and they confirmed my conclusions regarding their "security" features. While they state in their advertising and by phone through customer support that you can disable unauthorized people from saving, using "save as", and emailing files made secure by you, the originator, it is indeed UNTRUE. Confirmed today by phone, after close to a dozen calls, readers of "secure" documents, can indeed use the aforementioned commands to commandeer your proprietary documents and drawings. You can, however, get the features they claim to be included in version 6.0 (and upcoming 7.0) through Adobe Solutions, but to the expense of roughly $2000. As if this wasn't enough, once you get the software and start to use it, Adobe adds a disclaimer that users of some third-party, non-Adobe pdf viewers, can access your "secure" documents. Undoubtedly, the remaining features of their product are of great value, but these misrepresentations and untruths in advertising noteworthily deserve 1 star and a place in the hall of software shame. P.S. Version 7.0, soon to be released, has the same misrepresentations.

I love Acrobat. It won't work with Office 2003 (xp home on computer). Get a "unable to print to pdf" error upon installation. Check the Adobe homepage, it's a problem they're aware of (their recommended "fix" was to turn OFF "system restore" (which deletes ALL previous restore points!) and to edit the system path variable (also "icky" if no system restore to help out)

Don't do it........don't buy it....I tried the upgrade to 6.0.1 as well.........didn't work......wait for the fix in the next version....Acrobat is good...they'll fix it.....just have to be patient :-)

p.s. works like a champ in MS Office XP professional (not Office 2003)

Unfortunately, I think the Adobe Professional 6.0 might be the only game in town for someone who needs to convert a lot of paper documents into PDF files to post on the web. It does the job of converting scanned documents into PDF format very well. It's reasonably fast at that task. That's about the only nice thing about it. I found many, many things I did not like about the software. The help search feature is pathetic. It seems that the item I was looking for was ranked near the top in only 20% of the time. I think it's shameful that the very first customer call has to be paid for at $10 per call. I'm supposed to get one free call when I register, but only if it is one of their "known issues." How lame. I am sure the known issues does not cover a lot of real bugs in the software. Also, I tried three times but could not register. This should qualify as a "known issue." It locked up 3 of my e-mail addresses but still did not register me. The OCR ("paper capture") was really bad. Much, much worse than the free Microsoft scanner/OCR utility that is included with Windows (which had about 95% accuracy on my test page). When FineReader and Omnipage boasts greater than 99% accuracy, I can't believe how bad Adobe's OCR is. I think accuracy rates were around 50%, but I could not tell because the format I chose (to maximize the image quality that is displayed) puts the OCR results on an "invisible layer" - no kidding. I can only surmise that the OCR was bad because when I test for random words by searching for them about half the times the words were not identified although I can see them clearly from the "image layer." Headings do not seem to be identified most of the time. It seems large font gives its OCR trouble. Paper capture is also very slow. I also got "unsupported resolution" error messages when running paper capture. This is clearly a bug. When a document was scanned initially using Microsoft Photo Editor (and less frequently with Corel Painter Classic) and then it was converted to PDF using the Adobe program, it loses canvas size information. It seems to just look at the pixels, use the default twain resolution of 72 dpi or 96 dpi, and pronounce my document to be too large in inches and too low in resolution (even though the images were scanned in as 300 dpi images). I have resized the images and increase dpi with even smaller inches in the photo editor programs, but when I convert the file into Adobe PDF, the extra document density information seems to have been stripped out. I had to rescan a bunch of documents in Adobe because I could not perform paper capture on documents that were initially scanned using Microsoft Photo Editor. I got the professional version because it was supposed to give me advanced tools to edit photos within the Adobe program. It added 5 very simple tools (I think a crop and move tool). It was really, really not worth it. Get the standard version. The program also added a bunch of macros to my Microsoft Word, Excel, and Explorer programs. Now everytime I open a Word, Excel, or Explorer, it pops up a message saying some suspected Macros are trying to load. There is a noticeable delay when I click to allow the macros to load. I think this is very annoying. The only way to uninstall the macros is to uninstall the entire program and then reinstall the program without the macros. There should be a selective uninstall feature to disable each program's macros. All in all, it was a surprisingly bad experience from a company that is known for other quality programs.

OK, this does have some new features, which are handy. But some of the old, useful features of Acrobat 5 have disappeared. Remember how you could quickly edit spacing and wording of a document without having to go back and redo the PDF from the get-go? GONE. Can't find it. The online help is even more useless than ever. Bad, bad choices were made in this new version. Save your money, don't bother to upgrade.

The general direction of Adobe's efforts with Acrobat is admirable, so it is a bit disappointing to see them roll out such a half-baked product.

WHAT'S USEFUL --

[1] Fabulous document review capabilities -- you can edit directly into the underlying text, approve, then export them back into Word.
[2] More importantly, Acrobat sets up an excellent document-review work flow that works with Outlook and other mail programs to track who has received the document and responded.
[3] To simplify editing Acrobat transmits the PDF to the reviewers, who send back only their annotations. Acrobat then creates a compound document in which you can review all comments at once or individual comments by reviewer. With Word, you'd have to send everyone the same file, then compile the various changes.
[4] In MSIE, Acrobat 6.0 can quickly convert Web pages into PDF, creating either one composite file or separate files for each page.
[5] The generated PDFs maintain most HTML links and it can also store rich media files such as Flash and animated GIFs!!
[6] From Office documents, the bookmarking is now better (what a relief that is)
[7] The compressed converted files are smaller. This becomes less evident though if you have textboxes and graphics in your documents, which we usually have.

BUT, CAVEATS:

[1] The beast is a pain to install. I downloaded the "Tryout" version from the website, and my Acrobat does not work anymore. It will not convert a simple Word document (only formatting) due to some printer error. Not sure if this happens with every installation of this software but I am fairly technically savvy, have tried reinstalling, changing printer settings to FILE, etc etc. No go.
[2] It took over all my Acrobat 5 associations and registry settings, so remember that you cannot uninstall it and "go back" to Acrobat 5.
[3] The software is Bloated with a mega-capital B. I use a recent Pentium IV with 1 gig of RAM, and after the install of Acrobat 6, the thing practically crawls.
[4] Searching: Who needs the right-hand side navigation? Sure it "looks" cool to some people, but I'd much rather have the simple (and 10 times faster) Ctrl-F Windows pop-up box, as it is in every Windows app.

WHAT TO DO IF INSTALL CAUSES GRIEF:

[1] Don't install. Wait for the next version. (My general recommendation.)
[2] If things have already gone wrong, try to change the "PORT" on the Adobe PDF PRINTER settings in Control Panel to FILE:, then try printing out again (will ask you for filename, give a file path, e.g., c:\1.ps). Once the POSTSCRIPT file is generated, you can run it through the Acrobat Distiller to generate the PDF file.

ALL IN ALL:

If you use a supercomputer and are hard-pressed to upgrade immediately (e.g., if you use a version earlier than 5.x) than this may be worth it. But if you are at the 5 levels already, wait for the next version. Hopefully Adobe will have figured out the bloat and the install issues by then.