Sources familiar with the upcoming Acrobat 9—likely to be released early this summer—say one new wrinkle involves a forms data-tracking service via an updated Acrobat.com Web site to be unveiled along with the release of the application upgrade.

The service resolves, Adobe-style, the age-old question of, "Once you make a PDF form in Acrobat, what do you do next?" Users who create effective e-forms for the first time quickly become overwhelmed when they realize that they have to do something with the data coming in to them via forms.

If that holds through to release, some third-party solutions on the market now will still be able to compete on the basis of being more inclusive: They can take input data collected via PDF, HTML, Microsoft InfoPath, and other types of forms.

However, the Adobe-branded, PDF-only solution will likely be popular among organizations that only use PDF forms. Current indications are that the service will make available some of the technology found in Adobe's enterprise-class LiveCycle products to the individual Acrobat user. Meanwhile, regardless of whether they subscribe to the Acrobat.com service, in Acrobat a form owner will be able to track which recipients received their form as well as who filled it out and returned it, according to the sources.

Also expanded in Acrobat 9 will be document redaction, a feature available in Acrobat 8. This will appeal to government and legal customers who haven't already invested in third-party solutions that handle this touchy subject of privacy issues in public documents uploaded to the Web.

Another rumored feature is "PDF Portfolios," a new spin on a current feature called "PDF packages." Currently, users can leverage PDF as a wrapper to embed—or attach—non-PDF application files such as Microsoft Word and PowerPoint documents, so that supporting materials can be assembled in one place, even if they are in different formats. An advantage to this feature is the ability to use Acrobat password protection as an additional security layer for sensitive data.

Acrobat 9's Portfolio feature has a new, more organized, color-coded interface to make complicated document sets more visually appealing and easier to navigate.

Also included, the sources say, is an upgraded OCR (optical character recognition) engine to reduce errors in paper-to-PDF processes. Along the same lines, the Web Capture feature—which converts HMTL pages into PDF—is getting an upgrade. This feature is already one of the major value-adds Acrobat offers users over competing PDF-making apps. An upgraded search feature gives users better results searching across multiple PDFs.

Lastly, an improved "compare PDF documents" feature includes a new wizard to walk you through the process. Sources add that comparison results reports have been updated slightly over Acrobat 8's functionality. New to Acrobat 9 will be the ability to add comments to video, at the frame-by-frame level, sources say, as well as enhanced capabilities for incorporating Flash (.swf) files in PDFs.