There’s a new Acrobat family in town. On Monday, Adobe Systems introduced Acrobat X, the newest version of its popular electronic document format. The product family includes X versions of Acrobat, Reader and the suite, plus new document-exchange services at Acrobat.com.
The company said Acrobat X improves the ability to create higher-quality content, fosters tighter collaboration, and provides greater productivity. Kevin M. Lynch, vice president and general manager of the Acrobat group at Adobe, said the X version fills a need for “more fluid collaboration” and “richer experiences in today’s fast-paced, complex business environments.”
New Protected Mode
The X version adds a variety of new features to the popular document format. Users can view and interact with PDF files containing a wider variety of content types, such as drawings, e-mails, spreadsheets and videos. PDFs can be marked up using Sticky Notes and Highlighter tools, and a reading mode allows more content to fit on the screen, including a two-up for looking at page spreads.
A new Actions in version X simplifies multistep document preparation and publishing, PDF Portfolios has new layouts and visual themes, and PDFs can be checked in and out of SharePoint for version control when editing documents. The updated user interface allows for the most commonly used tools to be shown in one pane.
There’s also a new Protected Mode for Reader, which uses “sandboxing” to provide an additional layer of security.
In the last few months, security issues with Adobe’s PDF Reader, as well as its Flash Player, appeared, including zero-day attacks. Security firms such as Symantec have been warning that PDFs are vulnerable. In its 2010 Threat Predictions report released in late 2009, Symantec predicted that “Adobe software, especially Acrobat Reader and Flash, will take the top spot” as a target of cybercriminals, replacing Microsoft.
SendNow Document Exchange
Version X also offers…