Most of the enhancements in Acrobat 7 Professional are not really "mission-critical," although prepress pros who need more control over color spaces and Web designers who yearn for more robust forms-building tools may beg to differ. It's the collective weight of all of the small improvements that recommends this upgrade.

(For readers of Publish.com currently using Acrobat Standard, a more important question is whether they should upgrade to Acrobat Pro. The answer here is an unequivocal "yes," but that's based more on what happened in Acrobat 6 than what's happening in Version 7.)

Acrobat and the New PDF

Acrobat 7 marks the debut of version 1.6 of the PDF specification. (The digits of the PDF version number add up to the version number of Acrobat.) And like Acrobat 7, PDF 1.6 contains few bombshells. Here are a few key improvements and how they're reflected in Acrobat 7 Pro: