These emailers ask, in general, three questions:

1) A new Acrobat's on the way, right? Should I just hold off upgrading Leopard until then?

Interesting question. With Adobe, nothing's ever official when it comes to Acrobat release dates until the actual day of release, when the retail channel's about to be stuffed full of boxes. Heck, you sometimes can't even get anyone in San Jose to acknowledge on the record that they're actually working on the next version of the app without some sort of lockdown non-disclosure agreement.

I've heard in seminars this time around, however, that there is such a thing called Acrobat 9 in the works. No one's made me sign any non-disclosures, so I can say this without fear of retribution from Adobe's legal army. It will support MARS, I've been told, but that is a topic for another story—follow it at Joel Geraci's Adobe blog. Looking backward many revs, a pattern emerges: A new Acrobat release comes every 18 months or so. I'm guessing that a new version of Acrobat will come out, in all likelihood, in June (give or take a month or two).

In the PDF software developer world, no one I'm talking to says that Leopard's buggy or unstable, it's just new. One developer (not Adobe) who asked not to be identified says there have been a few "hiccups" with the way their particular production software interacts with the OS, but nothing a patch—likely out soon after the first of the year—can't fix.

Adobe, too, says it will issue a patch for Macintosh Acrobat users most likely in January, which at least theoretically should make your Leopard rig good to go if you've upgraded. As for waiting until the next Acrobat to upgrade to Leopard, it's up to you. It's probably intelligent to take a conservative approach if you're in charge of a room full of machines manned by designers who work under vein-melting production deadlines.

2) Acrobat Leopard update? What Acrobat update?

"Early 2008" is the word from Adobe. Keep up with this from day to day by reading Stephen Partridge's blog and checking for updated versions of the Adobe Leopard FAQ.

3) Adobe hates Mac users, and perennially gives them the shaft; the fact that they're waiting so long to issue an Acrobat patch is more evidence that Mac users are slipping further down the food chain and Adobe loves Windows users a lot more nowadays, right?

Sentiments like this crack me up, because people who say this suffer from temporary amnesia. They forget how the Macintosh-using rank and file of the design and production world is Adobe's meal ticket for the Creative Suite applications, including InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator.

In my opinion, Adobe supports Mac Acrobat users pretty well, even though Windows users might get an occasional extra feature (or group of features) or whatnot because Adobe's enterprise customers eschew Macs for PCs. That's life. Or, more cynically, it's how marketing works.

Just to prune the conspiracy theories that grow like kudzu out there in the Mac-osphere, I put this question to Adobe for the umpteenth time in the last decade. This time Michael Folkers, Acrobat group product manager, responded by echoing the abovementioned Leopard FAQ and stating that Adobe and Apple have been collaborating closely for months to ensure that the Creative Suite 3 applications, including Acrobat 8 Pro, run smoothly. Adobe Reader, too.

"Most of the CS3 applications and technologies are compatible with Leopard today without requiring additional updates," Folkers said in an email. "A few, including Acrobat 8, will require updates. . . . Acrobat users on the Mac have always pushed the product to its limits, and we look forward to providing them full support on Leopard."

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