Adobe's PDF empire never stops growing. Recently, the company officially announced the Adobe Acrobat 8 family, due to arrive on the shelves around the end of the year, and beta code shipped to reviewers. If you remember the difference between slowpoke version 6 and speedy version 7, you may be disappointed by the mostly incremental improvements in version 8, but, on the whole, the new release seems well worth the price of the upgrade.

Acrobat 8 Professional starts by displaying a new task-oriented menu with eight options, including choices that open a PDF, export to Word, HTML, and other formats, sign a PDF, fill in PDF forms, and more. These features also appear in a sleeker main toolbar. The latest version expands the old combine-PDF feature into a new wizard-style dialog that can join many types of files, such as those containing e-mail, into one PDF or into a package that collects multiple PDFs and has convenient navigation tools for scrolling through them. Older versions of Acrobat can open these packages but, confusingly, will show separate files as attachments.

With this version, the program finally can embed a PDF index in the PDF itself instead of saving it as a separate file. Other welcome features include a single, simple customizable toolbar instead of the previous confusing profusion, and the ability to create forms that users can fill in with the free Adobe Reader, saving the data. Acrobat Professional 8 can then remove the fields, but leave the data embeded in the forms. The product intelligently converts Word and HTML files designed as forms into PDFs—although all my attempts crashed the beta version of the form designer. The free Adobe Reader also gets a cleaner interface, again with fewer toolbars.

Adobe's press releases about Acrobat 8 trumpet a Web-based collaboration service called Adobe Connect, which proves to be mostly a relabeled version of Macromedia Breeze, with no connection at all to Acrobat itself except for a Start Meeting button on the Acrobat and Reader toolbars. Adobe talks vaguely about closer integration between Acrobat and Acrobat Connect in future versions, but if you decide that the use of the same name for unrelated products is just a misleading marketing plot, I would probably agree with you.

Acrobat 8 looks like it'll be a worthy upgrade when it comes out of beta. Of course, plenty could change between now and then (for better or worse), so I'm reserving judgment until the final version of the application is available, in November.