Adobe Acrobat 6.0 Professional

As I pointed out in AECbytes Newsletter #2, a new race between the PDF and DWF formats is opening up for electronic publishing in the AEC industry. The PDF format is being promoted primarily by Bentley in partnership with Adobe, the creator of PDF, while Autodesk is pushing the use of its own DWF format. Most CAD and BIM applications support both formats, so the choice of which standard to adopt is left primarily up to each individual AEC firm. AECbytes will devote a feature later on in the year to a detailed discussion of PDF versus DWF. In the interim, some of the main PDF and DWF applications will be reviewed, starting with Adobe Acrobat 6.0 Professional in this issue. Watch out also for the review of Autodesk's DWF Composer next month, and some other CAD-specific PDF products subsequently.

Why is this such an important issue? Because electronic publishing of AEC documents does not save on just paper and printing and shipping costs in the short term, during the design and construction phases of a project, but throughout the lifetime of a building. Electronic documents also go a long way towards facilitating the process of collaboration between the different parties involved in a building project, by making it so easy to distribute and review documents. And finally, electronic publishing is critical because this is one arena where the possibility of having an industry-wide standard is very high, in an otherwise very fragmented industry where standards are notoriously hard to define. Time will tell whether that standard becomes PDF or DWF or some yet-to-be-invented format; what is important is for a standard to exist and be universally accepted.

Product Background

Prior to version 6.0, Adobe Acrobat came as a single product. Thus, there was only one version of Adobe Acrobat 5.0. Adobe increasingly realized that different industry segments needed different PDF creation functionalities, which led the company to develop and launch Acrobat 6 as a family of products (see Figure 1). Acrobat 6.0 Standard is intended for a general business audience and provides business document exchange and review capabilities. Acrobat 6.0 Professional includes all the capabilities of the Standard version, and it addition provides special features for use in the CAD/CAM/AEC industry and for graphic design professionals. And finally, there is Acrobat Elements 6.0, which is a subset of the Standard version. Sold in volume licensing only, this version of Acrobat is targeted towards large enterprises to allow one-button conversion of Microsoft Office documents to the Adobe PDF format.

While all these versions of Acrobat are intended for creating and marking up PDF files and are sold at a price, Adobe also provides a free viewer that allows viewing and printing of PDF files. Formerly known as the Acrobat Reader, the post-version 6.0 viewer is simply called Adobe Reader, to avoid confusion with the Acrobat series of PDF authoring products. The ubiquity of this free viewer—it comes pre-loaded on most computers—is what has contributed so enormously to the success of the PDF format. Adobe estimates that more than 500 million copies of the viewer have been distributed worldwide.

The PDF Format

Before moving on to review Acrobat 6.0 Professional in detail, let's briefly explore the PDF file format itself. Short for Portable Document Format, PDF was developed by Adobe over ten years ago as a universal, compact, and Web accessible file format that preserves the fonts, images, graphics, and layout of any source document, regardless of the application and platform used to create it. This allows a PDF copy of a document to preserve the exact look and content of the original. Adobe chose to make PDF an open file format specification, available to anyone who wants to develop tools to create, view, or manipulate PDF documents. More than 1,800 vendors offer different kinds of PDF-based solutions, and the list continues to grow. Adobe continues to advance the PDF specification through new releases, the latest being version 1.5. All versions are backward compatible, which means that a viewer developed for the latest version can also view all previous versions. These are the various factors that have led to the establishment of PDF as the de facto standard for the distribution and exchange of electronic documents and forms world-wide.

In addition to the development of the PDF format itself, Adobe is partnering with various organizations and vendors in different industries to develop specialized PDF versions that are better suited to their specific document content and processes. One such specification that is already in use and has been certified as a standard by the ISO (International Standards Organization) is the PDF/X specification, which ensures reliable printing of press-ready, high-end color materials in the publishing industry. Another specification that is in the works is PDF/A, intended specifically for creating electronic archives of documents. And finally, there is the PDF/E specification, a new standards initiative to facilitate document collaboration and exchange in the engineering processes. Of particular relevance to the AEC industry, this specification is still in the early phases of development; a draft is expected to be submitted to the ISO in December 2004 and finalized by the end of 2006. With the involvement of industry leaders such as Bentley, HP, Intel, PTC, SolidWorks, Autodesk, and others in addition to Adobe, the effort seems very promising.

Repertoire of Acrobat 6.0 Professional

For those not familiar with the earlier version, Acrobat 5.0, it already provided a comprehensive set of capabilities for creating, editing, viewing, navigating, commenting, and searching PDF documents. It allowed one-button PDF creation from Microsoft Office applications, a very useful capability for a general business audience. Creating PDF files from other applications involved printing to the Acrobat Distiller printer. Once the PDF document was brought into the Acrobat 5.0 application, you could insert, remove, replace, crop, rotate, or renumber pages; add organizational and navigational aids such as thumbnails, bookmarks, and hyperlinks; make minor edits to text and graphic objects; add comments, graphic markups, and text markups; add digital signatures for verification; encrypt files for security; index document and document collections to make search easier; compare two PDF documents; and e-mail the document from Acrobat itself as an attachment. It also allowed users to create electronic forms and add interactivity to them, thus serving as an alternative to the traditional HTML-based forms we see in Web pages.

Acrobat 6.0 Professional adds several new capabilities to this already extensive feature set. Topping the list in terms of relevance to the AEC industry is better integration with applications such as AutoCAD, Microsoft Visio, and Microsoft Project. Let's look at the most critical of these for the average AEC practitioner—AutoCAD. Acrobat 6.0 Professional provides one-button Adobe PDF creation for AutoCAD versions 2002 and earlier. An update that can be downloaded from the Adobe website extends this functionality to AutoCAD 2004, which is the application I used for my testing. Figure 2 shows a sample file in AutoCAD 2004, with the Adobe PDF toolbar and menu. Clicking on the first tool converts the active model or layout tab to PDF, while the other two tools allow the generated PDF to be additionally e-mailed or sent for review. A menu option allows the selection of different conversion settings and security options. Both the model space as well as any of the layouts can be converted to PDF; however the PDF generated from a model space will not contain searchable text and layers, both of which are the additional new capabilities of Acrobat 6.0 Professional.

When a PDF is generated from a layout, you have the option of flattening the layers or retaining some or all of them. If you choose the Retain option, a dialog box lets you choose what layers should be present in the PDF files. As shown in Figure 3, layers can be organized into layers sets, and can also be renamed more meaningfully, if required. These layer settings can be conveniently saved and retrieved for future conversions.

When the PDF file is now generated and opened in Acrobat 6.0 Professional, the selected layers are listed in a separate panel and can be turned on and off as desired, as shown in Figure 4. This layer manipulation can also be performed in the free Adobe Reader. The various AutoCAD plot settings for color, line weight, and so on determine the resultant PDF and need to be set accordingly.

Acrobat 6.0 Professional has an expanded set of features for initiating, participating in, and tracking PDF document reviews, making it easier for a collaborative team review. Prior to this version, a PDF document would be sent to a reviewer as an e-mail attachment, who would mark it up and send it back to the author, again as an attachment. If several reviewers were involved in the process, the author would have to look at each marked-up file and separately incorporate all feedback in the original document. In version 6.0, the author can initiate an e-mail based review of a PDF document from within Acrobat, or a browser-based review (on the Windows platform only). All the reviewers who are invited to participate can add comments and markups to the document, and send them back to the author. These come back as ".fdf" files that contain only the comments and not the whole PDF file, so the file sizes are very small. The author can then see all the individual review comments consolidated together, which makes it easier to make the necessary edits to the document. Comments can also be sorted, filtered, summarized, imported, and exported. If the original document was created in Windows XP, selected comments can be automatically integrated into the document, a handy feature that can save the author considerable time and effort. Also, given Acrobat's ability to combine many different document types (text, spreadsheet, CAD, graphics, etc.) into one PDF document, those participating in the collaborative review process only require Acrobat 6.0 Standard or Professional; they do not require all the different applications that would otherwise be necessary to view the documents and provide feedback.

Another key new feature relevant to AEC professionals is the support for ARCH, ISO, JIS, and ANSI large page formats, which makes it easier to create PDF files from any CAD application. Prior to this, only a limited number of page sizes were available. The interface to add custom page sizes to the Adobe PDF printer has also been improved. The set of commenting tools for redlining drawings has been expanded to include polygon, oval, arrow, and cloud tools. Navigation of large documents has been made easier with the addition of a Dynamic Zoom tool, a Pan and Zoom window that lets you use a small window to adjust the magnification and position of the view area, and a Loupe tool that lets you see a magnified portion of the document in a small window. Three new measuring tools allow you to measure distances, perimeters, and areas, based on the scale that the CAD drawing was created which you need to specify. Figure 5 shows the use of some of these new features.

New features in Acrobat 6.0 relevant to graphic design and print production include a preflight feature that inspects a PDF document to determine its validity and detect problems before sending it to press; the ability to create PDF/X compliant files, which is the standard for the publishing industry mentioned earlier; the ability to create and preview color separations; and other advanced print options for setting marks and bleeds, color management, and device-dependent options for Postscript printers.

In addition, there are several other new features that are relevant to all users, including a new command that combines multiple files from various applications into one PDF document; the ability to right-click a document on the desktop and convert it to PDF; one-button PDF creation of Web pages from Internet Explorer (version 5 or later); direct creation of a PDF from a screen capture; the ability to certify a document and other improvements for enhanced security; improved search within a document as well as across several documents, without the necessity to create an index first; a new Properties toolbar for making it easier to edit the properties of comments, links, form fields, and other objects; and an improved interface for electronic form creation. Finally, one new feature that I was very impressed with was Read Out Loud, which reads aloud as much of a document as required. It is certainly a compelling feature for the visually impaired.

Strengths and Limitations

The biggest strength of Acrobat 6.0 Professional is that it comes from Adobe, a company known for making innovative, sophisticated, and classy products, including those mainstays of graphic design—Photoshop and Illustrator. Also, as the creator and continuing developer of the PDF format, Adobe is in a great position to create superior PDF products that integrate seamlessly with other Adobe products, and reasonably well with other products.

As a PDF tool for general documentation, Acrobat 6.0 Professional is a clearly superior application. It sports an elegant and easy-to-use interface, very much in line with other Adobe applications, and has an extensive set of capabilities for creating, editing, viewing, navigating, commenting, and searching PDF documents, and making them secure with digital signatures and encryption. The new reviewing capabilities are certainly useful when several people need to collaborate on a document, and as pointed out earlier, they do not need to have the individual applications from which the PDF file was generated. The ability to integrate comments back into Microsoft Word XP will also be much appreciated by those who deal extensively with document review. For those already using Acrobat 5.0 for general business documentation, the additional benefits of Acrobat 6.0 Professional would be well worth the reasonable cost of the upgrade, which is $149.

Where the benefits of Acrobat 6.0 Professional are not so clearly compelling is in its support for creating PDFs from CAD applications, particularly when compared with the capabilities of CAD-specific applications such as those described in AECbytes Newsletter #3. While the one-button PDF creation from AutoCAD is useful when only one drawing needs to be converted to PDF, it does not support batch processing. You cannot use it to create PDFs from all or selected layouts in a drawing, let alone select multiple AutoCAD files and generate PDFs from all their layouts. Thus, Acrobat may not be the best solution for large production runs in AutoCAD. Acrobat also does not support the line merge feature, which allows visibility of intersecting colored lines, shaded areas of a drawing, and text above or below shaded areas in a PDF. While the latest version of MicroStation, V8 2004, has advanced PDF creation capabilities, there is no one-button PDF creation support yet for other key industry applications such as ArchiCAD and Autodesk Revit. And it is not clear when the latest AutoCAD version, 2005, will be supported.

Also, while the new support for retaining the AutoCAD layers in the PDF file is a neat feature and can make it easier to view a complex document, its other benefits are unclear. Individual layout drawings in AutoCAD are usually created with the required layers turned on and the non-required layers turned off, so why would a viewer of the PDF file need to further manipulate the visibility of layers? This would be equivalent to giving options for turning off the visibility of images, tables, text in specific formats, and so on in a general document, which we haven't yet seen because it is clearly not a compelling requirement.

And finally, at a price of $449 for the full version, Acrobat 6.0 Professional is relatively pricey, compared to other PDF applications, both CAD-specific and general-purpose. For those not already using Acrobat, it would be a significant investment. In particular, if Acrobat is being used for the collaborative review capability, it requires all the team members to have the Standard or Professional version, the cost of which could be considerable. (For large organizations using the collaborative review feature, Adobe offers a server-based product—Adobe Reader Extensions Server—that allows the free Adobe Reader to be used for commenting and reviewing a PDF file.)

Conclusions

Recall that in my AECbytes feature, "Technology at Work at Gehry: A Case Study," I described how the best solution Gehry Partners found for electronic documentation was to generate TIFF files from AutoCAD at full print resolution and then embed those within a PDF file for distribution. Despite the large file sizes involved, this was found to be the only solution that fully retained the integrity of the drawing. While this procedure is certainly not representative of AEC firms at large, it comes from one of the leading architectural firms in the world, and points to the fact that creating PDFs is not yet foolproof. To get the right results for line weights, shading, images embedded within a drawing, merging and overlapping lines, and so on, there are advanced settings that need to be manipulated in any PDF creation application. Acrobat 6.0 Professional would be a lot more compelling for CAD-specific tasks if it offered more graphic options for drawings and an easy way to fine-tune their settings, so that firms like Gehry Partners would not have to resort to roundabout means to achieve the results they wanted.

The other aspect to note is that even though the PDF specification allows for custom data to be attached to the entities in a PDF document, giving it the potential to embed non-graphic information such as object attributes, it is still primarily a 2D format. How will the requirements of electronic publishing change once building information modeling becomes a norm? Once we rely more on the model itself to communicate information and less on 2D documentation generated from the model, PDF in its current form will clearly be inadequate. How will the new PDF/E standard adequately support BIM, given that it is common to all engineering applications and not specific to AEC? There are no easy answers to these questions right away, but it is important to be aware of these issues.

For the here and now of the PDF world, however, Acrobat 6.0 Professional can be rated as a superior application with unsurpassed editing, viewing, navigating, commenting, searching, and securing capabilities. For CAD, it is pricier and does not offer all the features of competing CAD-specific PDF applications, and the quality of the output is too dependent upon settings that require effort to understand and manipulate. However, it is an excellent tool for business documentation in general.

About the Author

Lachmi Khemlani is founder and editor of AECbytes. She has a Ph.D. in Architecture from UC Berkeley, specializing in intelligent building modeling, and consults and writes on AEC technology. She can be reached at lachmi@aecbytes.com.