back to article Adobe swings out Acrobat 9

Adobe Systems today released the latest version of its document creation software – Acrobat 9. The San Jose, California-based company said that the revamped software includes built-in Flash and multimedia support. Customers using the new version can now convert .Mov and .Wmv files to Flash content that can be embedded within …

COMMENTS

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    So let me see...

    You can create documents in the new format, but you can't view them for another month... surely it would be better to ensure that you release both at the same time? Why bother to create any new content whilst there aren't any viewers out there?

  2. amanfromMars Silver badge
    Thumb Up

    Yes... It is a serious question. :-)

    Does Acrobat Reader 9 come with its own Dedicated Media Players/Content Providers .... for an Edge Advantage/Vulnerability Exploit Opportunity with Private Goods and Treasured Possessions.

  3. Ash
    Thumb Down

    'Bloatier version lands."

    There, fixed that for you.

    http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php - Already supports embedded multimedia.

  4. Guy

    Acrobat Sucks - Fox It Rules

    Sounds like their sticking more features in that practically no one will ever use, which just means the reader will take even longer to load all the random rubbish that Adobe seems happy to stick it with.

    Foxit Reader for the win, I've opened 100+ page PDF's with images in under a second.

  5. Alan
    Unhappy

    Prices

    "Adobe today published US and Canadian prices for Acrobat 9 which comes in three varieties: Standard at $299, or $99 to upgrade, Pro for $449, or $159 to upgrade, and Pro Extended for $699, or $229 to upgrade."

    So the UK prices will be at least £299 for Standard, £449 for Pro & £699 for Pro Extended.

    When will Adobe et al learn that you don't do currency conversions just by changing the $ sign to a £ sign

  6. Jeremy
    Flame

    Not more bloat....

    Please God, no, not more PDF bloat....... Seems Adobe have forgotten what the acronym stands for.

    Adobe Reader 9 - now starts up in less than 120 seconds!

  7. Matthew Saroff
    Gates Horns

    So How Many Gig is the Download

    Acrobat Reader has become so bloated.

  8. Leo Davidson
    Thumb Down

    You can't print it, so why?

    The PDF format and viewers all suck for viewing documents on-screen. The format is only good for documents that are destined for the printer. So WTF are they adding video support to it for?

    Gah, it's bad enough as it is when people choose PDF instead of a more suitable on-screen format such as HTML. This is only going to encourage people.

  9. Steven Hunter
    Thumb Up

    @Prices

    I'll make you feel worse: In the "Upper Level Academic Institution" where I work we pay *$36* for a license to Acrobat Pro 8. (And the professors still have the gall to complain that it's not free.)

  10. Spearbox

    Odd one out?

    Guess me, and probably most other professionals are the only ones who have been eagerly awaiting this release?

    I actually found out about two weeks ago, but what the hey.

    I'm soo happy... /pop

  11. Shane Kent

    RE: Not more bloat....

    I second that! Guess they should rename it from PDF to MMDF, seeing printed movies don't make much sense.

  12. Chika
    Flame

    @Prices

    "When will Adobe et al learn that you don't do currency conversions just by changing the $ sign to a £ sign"

    When the suckers paying the £ finally start kicking up a stink about it. Or something else comes along and starts ripping the rug out from beneath their fat, swollen, cheese-ridden arses, of course. Hail Foxit reader and all those many folk that do free or cheap PDF converters!

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I agree, Foxit is the biz

    Dumped that pie-gobbling pot-bellied bloatmonster from acrobat with its ever-more-fiddled-with user interface, sloth, and its bad rendering (which was the final straw) and went to foxit. That is *fast*.

    Does anyone know how they did it? Is there a precompile phase or summat?

  14. Steven Knox
    IT Angle

    RE: Odd one out

    "Guess me, and probably most other professionals are the only ones who have been eagerly awaiting this release?"

    Professional whats?

  15. ChessGeek

    Simple Math

    PDF + Flash = More Opportunities for Vulnerabilities.

    Doesn't that sound like fun?

  16. Glenn Amspaugh
    Unhappy

    Buy our software and we won't give it to you

    So, as of Monday, our shop was told that we couldn't order Acrobat 8 any more and would have to order Acrobat 9. No problem, costs $8.00 more than 8 but customers are cool. Today, customers started receiving their Acrobat Install Key and a link out to Adobe's site. Only problem is that, apparently, Adobe isn't shipping Acrobat Pro/Std 9. They're just sending out install keys. Sigh.

  17. J
    Pirate

    Yuck...

    Whomever embeds audio/video in documents (pdf, doc, whatever) deserves the death penalty (summary judgment, too).

    Now, $699 for a bunch of bits and bytes? Crazy MFs... All my PDF needs are taken care of for $0, and in a much better way, apparently (LaTeX or OpenOffice). The only decent and fast PDF creator (from Word docs) here in the lab is my OpenOffice install. Other people people here have Acrobat 8 installed, but it always takes ages to create the PDF (when it doesn't just crash, which is common), and the final look sometimes is not exactly the same as in the doc. So such documents get sent to me for the final conversion (but then I have to check if OOo didn't screw up anything from Word, oh well...). For some reason, the "Export as PDF" from OOo just does it in under a second, no matter the document, and it always looks identical to the original. Why is that, I don't have a clue...

  18. Andy Dent

    Have to accept that embedded 3D valuable for some users

    I used to work with a bunch of modeling scientists who were very happy with the 3D facilities in Acrobat 8. There was no other way (*) for them to create content that could be easily published and distributed for such visualisations as are allowed by the time-varying 3D movies Acrobat provided.

  19. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    So then,

    How many gig of RAM and how mighty a processor will you need to load it up (let alone run it at any decent speed).

    I hate to think what its install size is. Adobe is into serious bloat.

    Their stuff is becomming less and less apealing each release.

  20. Paul Stephenson
    Alert

    Do my eye's deceive me?

    or did amanfromMars just post something in more or less plain english? :O

    @Alan, One day, we can but hope that price conversion does not equate to swapping the dollar sign. I doubt it will happen, but one can hope!

  21. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    More places to hide porn!

    Right more places for my users to hide their porn vids, well makes a change from the sales team using powerpoint I guess.

  22. Steve King

    Printing Movies

    Surely this is how Harry Potter does it?

  23. Ivan Headache

    @You can't print it, so why?

    Shows that very few people (even professionals?) understand where Acrobat is going. I sat through a presentation on Acrobat 9 last night (it launches on a macbook pro in under 1 second (honest - saw it happen several times)).

    There's much more to Acrobat than just making cross platform docs (and a lot more than the very brief story suggests) and in reality the program is not for the ordinary joe

    I, for one, would much rather have a 50 page pdf than the equivalent in HTML.

  24. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    @Ivan Headache

    So where's it going?

    "I, for one, would much rather have a 50 page pdf than the equivalent in HTML." - and I, for one, would not.

  25. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    Speedy loading

    Having had a bit of a go on Reader 9, it does seem to load up very very quickly.

    However, I couldn't possibly comment on whether it has chuffing great big memory leaks or issues with hogging the CPU. Still.

  26. Ivan Headache

    @ AC

    OK, You send your 50 page HTML file to a print-shop and I'll send my PDF.

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