Adobe will include changes to make use of Acrobat consistent across the suite and to simplify error correction.
Amber Felts, senior designer and project manager at Houston-based corporate branding and strategies company fd2s, has used Adobe Systems Inc.'s Photoshop and Illustrator for over 10 years—or, as she said, since "back when computers were really slow."
Although she uses Adobe CS in her work at fd2s, Felts still runs Illustrator 10 and Photoshop 6 in Mac OS X Classic Mode on the Power Mac G5 she uses in her home office. Felts said she plans to upgrade to Adobe CS2 Premium, but her primary motivation for doing so is different from what one might think, given the plethora of new features in CS2 being trumpeted by Adobe and many in the tech press.
For her part, Felts said she is looking forward to running Illustrator and Photoshop natively in OS X, and has heard that it has been designed with the G5 processor in mind, although she admitted she did not know whether that was an urban legend or not. Also, she hopes that Illustrator CS2 will be more stable than the version she uses at fd2s because "Illustrator has a funny way of simply shutting down unexpectedly while you are working sometimes. It gives you a message 'Illustrator has unexpectedly quit,' as if you didn't notice," she said.
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Most important for Felts, however, is that Adobe CS2 Premium comes with Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Professional.
"It's the seller for me. I make tons of [PDFs] for presentations to clients—handouts at meetings, e-mailing for approvals on progress presentations, getting feedback from other designers as I am working on things," Felts said.
"I can make Illustrator files separately for various versions of logos for the same client or multiple pages of a presentation and just magically add them into the PDF document without having to convert each one to PDF format first. [Acrobat 7.0 Professional] allows me to select the Illustrator files, and it converts and [then] adds them in one step," Felts explained.
Lonn Lorenz, product manager of Adobe CS and Acrobat at Adobe, did not seem surprised by Felts' sentiments. "The use of PDF files in creative pro workflows has grown exponentially, [and] with Acrobat 7.0 Professional, we wanted to answer our customers' requests to create PDFs with as few errors as possible," he said.
According to Lorenz, Adobe made several under-the-hood code changes so that PDF creation could be consistent throughout all of CS2 Premium. CS2 provides users with a common PDF directory that spans across all the applications where users can apply either a preset or customized shared settings file to standardize PDFs for specific needs.
Acrobat 7.0 Professional not only keeps this information in an easy-to-access shared location, but it lets the user know when these presets have been violated in the creation of a PDF document and whether Acrobat 7.0 Professional can fix it.
An example of a standard PDF preset is PDF/X-1A, a popular preset for print ad layouts, said Lorenz. PDF/X-1A standards include that the file must not have RGB colors and that the fonts to be used must be embedded within the document. If the preflight tools in Acrobat 7.0 Professional find that RGB color has been used, for example, it will either try to convert the colors to their closest CMYK equivalent or flag a warning about the problem.
Acrobat 7.0 Professional automates preflight according to the settings chosen. Documents that pass go in one designated folder while those that fail to follow the proper constraints go into another. Moreover, Acrobat 7.0 Professional allows users to fix problems within the PDF itself, rather than having to backtrack to the source file.
Click here to read more about preflight tools in Acrobat 7.
Felts said that this aspect was particularly important in her work. Having to return to a source file is "one more step that takes time. If you are working on a 12-page document, you can be looking at 20 minutes or more," she said.
Acrobat 7.0 Professional also facilitates creative workflows through its capability to allow collaborative comments. Lorenz said that a user can e-mail a PDF file to others to review, even those who only have access to the free Acrobat Reader or a Web browser. Acrobat 7.0 Professional enables the user to track which parties have returned comments, merge the comments into a single PDF and stack the comments in relationship to one another or in order of importance.
The user can then make the needed corrections—and track them as well, which is important when there are several versions of the same document.
"Our goal for Acrobat 7.0 Professional and beyond is to continue to streamline workflow. And to [do so], the ability to enable collaboration and make corrections from within the [PDF] file itself is crucial," given that PDF has become the de facto final delivery file format for both prepress and on screen, Lorenz said.
Document Management 
