Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Professional

Earlier this month, Adobe released the next version of its Acrobat family of products that is built around the PDF file format. PDF was developed by Adobe over ten years ago as a universal, compact, and Web accessible file format which preserves the fonts, images, graphics, and layout of any source document; since then, it has become the de facto standard for the distribution and exchange of electronic documents and forms world-wide. Adobe is now pushing PDF not just as an electronic publishing solution but as an "intelligent document" platform that can support a range of essential business activities and workflows. The Acrobat 7.0 family is intended to deliver on the expanded capabilities of PDF and become even more critical to businesses by providing users with the ability to assemble documents from multiple sources, create intelligent forms, and collaborate on projects more easily and cost-effectively.

We may not have quite arrived at the paperless office yet, the promise of which has been in the offing for so many years. But we are certainly getting closer to it every day, with so much of our business being transacted electronically online. I know I certainly print a lot less than I used to, and most of my professional as well as personal data now exists in an electronic format rather than on paper. This trend is only going to gain in momentum, and PDF continues to be one of the most critical components of this electronic revolution.

Having established its supremacy for text-based documents in general, Adobe is now attempting to address the documentation needs of different vertical industries by developing specific functionalities for them. In the case of the AEC industry, it is facing an intense competition in this arena with Autodesk's DWF format, and both companies are working hard to push their own format as the standard. Adobe had already added new functionality related to design and engineering documentation in the previous version of Acrobat (see my review of Acrobat 6.0 Professional), and Autodesk released DWF Composer last year that provided integrated markup capability with the AutoCAD 2005 family of products (see my review of DWF Composer). At Autodesk University 2004 (see AECbytes Newsletter #16), the big news on the DWF side was the new ability to publish 3D DWF files, critical in an industry that is slowly but surely moving away from 2D to 3D. In this product review, we will see what new enhancements Adobe has engineered in the Acrobat 7.0 family to make the PDF format still a compelling option for users in the AEC industry.

Please refer to my review of Acrobat 6.0 Professional for a detailed overview of the Acrobat family of products (Acrobat Standard, Acrobat Professional, Acrobat Elements, and the free Adobe Reader), the PDF format, and the extensive capabilities introduced in the previous version that version 7.0 builds upon.

Enhancements Relevant to Design and Engineering Professionals

Acrobat 7.0 Professional has improved upon the one-button PDF creation from CAD applications such as AutoCAD and Microsoft Visio that it introduced in version 6.0. Take the example of AutoCAD. While previously only the active model or layout tab could be converted to PDF, you can now select multiple layouts for conversion and sequence them as desired, as shown in Figure 1. These multiple layouts appear as separate pages in the PDF file, as shown in Figure 2. Recall that in Acrobat 6.0, the PDF generated from a layout contained searchable text and had the ability to preserve drawing layers, but this capability did not extend to a PDF generated from the model space. Acrobat 7.0 improves upon this by providing layering support and searchable text generation from model space in addition to layout space, as well as the generation of layers in AutoCAD documents containing proxy objects, and clipped xref/blocks. So a PDF file generated from AutoCAD, from versions 2002 up to 2005, can now include multiple layouts as well as the individual layers within each layout, which can be turned on or off as desired. As before, this layer manipulation can also be done in the free downloadable Adobe Reader.

Other enhancements related to AutoCAD integration include the automatic embedding of the scale from each viewport when converting the file, so that you no longer have to calibrate the scale manually when using the measuring tools for distance, perimeter, and area, as in the previous version. The measurements you take can be retained as markups in the PDF file with annotations; the annotations and measurements can also be exported to Microsoft Excel, allowing for quick cost estimates based on the quantity take-offs.

On the markups front, Acrobat 7.0 introduces two new drawing markup tools to better serve the reviewing needs of architects and engineers: the Callout tool for creating text box markups that point to specific areas of a PDF document; and the Dimensioning tool for adding line comments between two points. The use of the Callout tool, along with some other markup and commenting tools, is shown in Figure 2. Also new in version 7.0 is the ability to export Adobe PDF file comments back into the original authoring AutoCAD file, so that the comments can be seen in the context of the original document (see Figure 3), and the appropriate changes can be made. The markups are imported as proxy objects on a separate layer, leaving the original drawing unaltered. With this introduction of this feature, Acrobat has succeeded in catching up with one of the critical advantages DWF Composer had over it so far: the ability to round-trip markups with the AutoCAD 2005 product family for a smoother and more efficient iterative review process (see my review of DWF Composer). In fact, Adobe goes beyond in a way by providing this capability in AutoCAD 2002, 2004, as well as 2005, whereas DWF Composer's round-tripping capability only works with the AutoCAD 2005 product family.

The overall reviewing capability has also been considerably improved. While Acrobat 6.0 Professional had introduced an expanded set of features for initiating, participating in, and tracking PDF document reviews, these were only available to those who had the Standard or Professional version, making it a pricey proposition. With the introduction of the version 7.0 family of products, the electronic document reviewing capabilities have been extended even to those who have the free Adobe Reader 7.0, allowing a wider variety of people to fully participate in a review. Commenting rights are document-specific, and are available only when the review initiator working in Acrobat 7.0 Professional awards the necessary usage rights to users working with Adobe Reader. A wizard is now included to streamline the review initiation process, and a Review Tracker can monitor and manage all outgoing and incoming reviews. For those reviewing text documents, the option to import the comments back into the original authoring Word file (version 2002 or later) can be very convenient and efficient.

Professionals working with Microsoft Visio can now embed the object-level custom properties from Visio into the PDF document. These properties get converted to object data, which can be viewed in a window when the PDF file is opened in Acrobat or Adobe Reader. Previously, all the Visio custom properties associated with an object were lost.

Another new feature in Acrobat 7.0 Professional that should be particularly exciting to designers is the ability to embed, view, and navigate 3D content in PDF files. The 3D content has to be in the Universal 3D Format (U3D), which is an open specification developed by the 3D Industry Forum, a cross-industry group of more than 30 developers and corporate users of 3D graphics technology, including Intel, Adobe, Bentley Systems, Boeing, HP, and Right Hemisphere. The group is working with an international standards body on proposing the U3D Format as an ISO standard for sharing interactive 3D content over the web. Bentley just announced that MicroStation V8 2004, which already had advanced PDF generation capabilities, can now directly export interactive and animated 3D models and photorealistic renderings in the U3D format to PDF. An example is shown in Figure 4. This 3D content can be viewed and fully interacted with by even those with the free Adobe Reader 7.0—it includes a full set of navigation tools that lets viewers selectively control the visibility of model geometry, move to predefined viewing locations, and adjust display modes. This new ability expands the scope of PDF beyond 2D to also convey some 3D design information to the project team, consultants, clients, and so on.

Other Enhancements Not Specific to AEC

Acrobat 7.0 Professional comes with several other enhancements and new features relevant to all users rather than just those in a specific industry. The single-click PDF creation functionality—already available for many Microsoft applications including Office, Project, Internet Explorer, and Visio—has been extended to Microsoft Access, Publisher, and Outlook. The Outlook integration allows single or multiple email messages or a complete mail folder to be quickly converted into a searchable PDF file. This would be a great way to archive email, which gets increasingly larger in quantity and cumbersome to manage the more we go electronic. It is unfortunate that this email-to-PDF creation capability is limited only to Microsoft Outlook and cannot be developed for the commonly used Outlook Express because of its lack of APIs.

For those suffering from paper overload, you can now scan multiple-page paper documents directly into Adobe PDF for efficient sharing, archiving, and commenting. You can also perform optical character recognition (OCR) automatically on the scanned files, transforming paper documents into searchable text.

If you are bogged down by an overload of PDF files, Adobe gives you a solution to this problem as well in the form of a new Organizer tool that lets you quickly find—using thumbnails and document properties—PDF files on your local hard drive or those which you have recently viewed on your network and on the web (see Figure 5). After the files are located, you can group them into your own defined collections (without physically re-locating them), so you can find them again much more easily. You can also perform various actions on multiple Adobe PDF files such as printing, emailing, sending for review, or combining, within the Organizer.

Other interface enhancements include a New Window feature that lets you open multiple windows, allowing you to view different parts of a document side by side, particularly useful on multiple monitors; integration of text, image and table selection tools into a single Select tool; integration of all review and commenting tools in a single, dedicated menu; and a new Find toolbar to make search easier. The application launch time has been reduced and PDF creation is also faster compared to Acrobat 6.0 Professional.

Other new features include the ability to create a watermark by simply typing in text or by using a JPEG or BMP image; better control over a watermark's appearance and positioning such as alignment, scaling, and the ability to prevent resizing or repositioning so that the watermark will always be visible when printing; easier addition of customized headers and footers to a document and improved control over page numbering; the ability to attach any types of files to a PDF document so that a whole set of documents can be packaged and transmitted as required, with encryption capabilities to protect files during transit; enhanced security features, including more robust signature validation, the ability to create and apply named security policies capturing a group of frequently used security settings, and advanced options using the new Adobe LiveCycle Policy Server that can expire and revoke documents, maintain accountability by keeping track of who opens protected documents, and so on; and the ability to create interactive XML-based PDF forms that can incorporate business logic with the bundled Adobe LiveCycle Designer software.

Strengths and Limitations

Acrobat 7.0 Professional is a solid upgrade with a host of new features and enhancements for general business documentation, and some critical new functionality for design and engineering documentation. By opening up the electronic review capability to anyone who can download the free Adobe Reader, Adobe has made the deployment of Acrobat practically a no-brainer for businesses that deal with documentation in any way. Adobe has gone further to make Acrobat and PDF more compelling for AEC professionals by providing better integration with AutoCAD, new markup tools such as Callout, and the ability to embed, view, and navigate 3D content within PDF. Given all these capabilities, plus the ubiquity of the PDF format, Acrobat 7.0 Professional is hard to beat.

However, some limitations still remain, primarily from a CAD perspective, particularly when compared with the capabilities of CAD-specific PDF applications such as those described in AECbytes Newsletter #3. As I pointed out in my review of the previous version of Acrobat Professional, it does not support batch processing very well and is not the best solution for large production runs. You cannot create separate PDFs from the individual layouts in an AutoCAD drawing, let alone select multiple AutoCAD files and generate PDFs from all their selected layouts. Acrobat still 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 (see Figure 6). This feature can be important for high fidelity viewing and plotting. And while the sizes of the PDF files generated with Acrobat 7.0 Professional from AutoCAD are 20% smaller than those created with Acrobat 6.0, I still found them almost 6 times larger compared with another CAD-specific PDF creation application I tested. This was true even for a PDF file generated from Acrobat without layers. It would add up to a substantial file size difference for project sets with many sheets, and would be a critical factor when considering electronic transmission, the time required to open and navigate the sheet set, and so on.

Conclusions: The Challenges Ahead

Looking ahead, at least from the perspective of the AEC industry, Acrobat needs to continue to broaden its focus from 2D to 3D to keep up with the inevitable move towards building information modeling (see my recent newsletter on the Technology for Construction 2005 conference). Its ability to capture object data, which is currently limited only to Microsoft Visio, should be extended to BIM applications such as Autodesk Revit, ArchiCAD, the Bentley suite of building solutions, Autodesk Architectural Desktop, and so on. This can allow the PDF document to become an intelligent repository of all the building-related data rather than just a dumbed down version of the design representation. DWF is already there with the ability to publish 3D DWF that includes object properties from some Autodesk applications; in addition there are other specialized applications such as such as NavisWorks and Solibri Model Checker specifically developed for the design and review needs of a 3D building information model. As the building industry moves away from the use of drawings to models, Adobe has to find innovative ways to adapt the PDF technology to it, otherwise PDF will find it difficult to sustain and grow the leading market share it currently has in electronic publishing in AEC.

But the substantial improvements that have been made in Acrobat 7.0 Professional, both from a general business perspective as well as specific to design and engineering, are evidence that Adobe has both the intellectual and development resources to take up the challenge. The use of PDF has already expanded well beyond its initial scope of static viewing and printing to actually interacting with the document—manipulating layers, navigating 3D content, commenting and markup, and so on. It will be interesting to see how much further the PDF format can go.

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.

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