Today Adobe organized a free seminar at the Marriott Metro Center in D.C. to showcase some new features of Acrobat 9. I currently have 9Pro at home, but had no idea there were soo many cool additions!In addition to the free session, Adobe offered us a free continental breakfast too! (Nice touch Adobe). The session ran from 9:30am – 12:30pm, and was hosted by Acrobat gurus Rick Borstein and Mark Middleton.
There’s no way these guys could cover ALL the new features in 3 hours, but they touched on the highlights. Adobe has significantly improved the Typewriter tool feature, OCR, Form field creation, Redaction, and PDF to web page conversion features. One of the biggest highlights – the ‘PDF Portfolio’ addition. This thing is cool, and actually pretty useful for Graphic Designers who want to develop PDF samples for email. PDF Portfolio basically takes your PDF files (and Word files, emails, spreadsheets, etc.), and creates an interactive presentation, that can be customized with a background, header graphic and logo. You can even customize your documents to flow ‘a la’ iPod album scroll style.
In the Pro-Extended version, there’s also a nifty PowerPoint plug-in that allows you to add more interactivity to your presentation – including voice over narration. Now PDF can work seamlessly with PowerPoint exports – and you can view and navigate your slides directly through Acrobat.
And the coolest feature added: you can now watch/play Flash movies WITHIN your PDF document! Meaning, if you do a PDF web capture on a website that has Flash – when you open your document in Acrobat, your PDF will play your Flash movie right in the document. Niiice.
Don’t’ forget to download Acrobat Reader 9 – it’s free!! Some of these ‘special’ features can only be viewed with the newest Acrobat versions.
I don’t use Adobe Acrobat outside of creating PDFs from the Creative Suite, but it’s always cool to take advantage of free seminars…especially ones that feed you!
(Unfortunately, the lady in front of me didn’t learn a darn thing. She knitted the entire time. Why come to a seminar to knit?!)
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