good news: Powerful web and cross-platform document sharing program gets better.
bad news: Still some confusing tools.
 

Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF)—the format for files created by Adobe Acrobat—is already the unchallenged standard for cross-platform document sharing. This new version of Acrobat, though not revolutionary, is a significant upgrade that can only reinforce that dominant position. 

Acrobat's primary function is to transform documents created in other applications into the PDF file format. PDF files can be viewed by a free application called Acrobat Reader, which is available for most operating systems, including the Mac OS, Windows, Linux, and many variations of Unix. Acrobat works by acting as a virtual printer. To convert a document to PDF you select Acrobat in the Chooser, print your document from its originating application, and save the resulting PDF file to your hard drive. Your original document's exact appearance is retained, with graphics and formatting intact. It's almost too easy. 

As you would expect from a $249 program, Acrobat does more than just convert documents to PDF. By virtue of its fairly extensive editing and annotating features, it's also a capable cross-platform document collaboration program. And it's a versatile publishing platform, offering, among other things, reasonably extensive printing and color management controls for accurate four-color printing and the ability to create forms that anyone can fill out using the free Acrobat Reader. 

So what's new in version 5.0? A revamped user interface, for one thing. Modeled on Microsoft's Office apps, it sports familiar-looking toolbars and tear-away tool palettes, but the new look just made us shrug. The previous interface, though not bad overall, had some confusing tools and labels, and those are mostly unchanged. 

Version 5.0 also supports Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning, which lets multiple collaborators use their web browsers to annotate a single PDF document located on a LAN or web server. After some initial setup problems, this feature worked well for us and offers some potential advantages to workgroups with widely dispersed members. Acrobat now also supports digital signatures with 128-bit encryption, and it's easy to add, view, and verify signatures in any PDF document. Other new features include automated extraction of images and graphics from PDF documents, customizable toolbars, XML support for PDF form data, and a nice "compare" command that graphically highlights differences between two versions of a document.

This new release also enhances some already-existing features, including Acrobat's printing and color management controls, form generation tools, and security settings. Advanced users, especially those who print PDF documents on four-color presses or do a lot of document collaboration, will appreciate these tweaks.

Acrobat was already a well designed, multi-faceted program, and version 5.0 offers some genuine improvements. If you create documents that must be viewable on almost any computer, you need this program.