Editor’s Note: This article is part of the Adobe Acrobat 6.0 Learning Center

In our opinion, Adobe’s new flagship product Acrobat 6 is the most significant
release since version 1.0 came out almost 10 years ago. Whilst at the time of writing this piece there are still a few loose ends left to take care of, for the most part we view this release as being truly groundbreaking. Unlike the release of Acrobat 5.0, which in comparison with 6.0 was a fairly minor update, we are much more bullish about the benefits that Acrobat 6.0 is going to bring to its potential customers and users.

From the moment you open the application it becomes immediately obvious that
there have been significant effort and resources deployed to this release. If we had
to sum up the release in a single word, we’d be suggesting ‘maturity’.

New toolbars, new menus, new navigation tabs, new pane, new names, new
versions, new features. There’s a lot new and there’s a lot to learn. Here’s
Planet PDF’s overview of some of the most interesting changes.

• Creating PDFs
• Commenting & Reviewing
• Layers (Optional Content Groups)
• Reducing File Size & PDF Optimizer
• Search and Catalog
• Headers & Footers, Watermarks & Backgrounds

Measuring & Zoom

Other creative professional tools include new ways to view a PDF, including:

• Rulers & Measuring — allow you to accurately measure distances and areas
  of the page.
  
• Zoom increased — zoom large, detailed documents to 6400%.
  
• Split window — view different pages of the same PDF by splitting the screen.
  
• Dynamic Zoom — lets you grab the page and zoom dynamically by moving the
  cursor around.
  
• Loupe Tool — ideal for working with large format documents like those generated by AutoCAD. This tool lets you zoom into areas on the page.
  

Flash, animation, transitions

Fully embedded multimedia has taken its time to move across to PDF — support
includes Flash files, MP3 files, PowerPoint animation conversions and better
control over Acrobat transitions. Now that it’s here, we’d suggest that we’re
going to see some very interesting documents. The concept of PDF being a rich
container of content is proven here with this release.

eBooks & DRM

Goodbye Adobe Acrobat eBook Reader, everything is now integrated directly into
Acrobat — as long time supporters of eBooks, we’re interested to see the
merging of the two separate applications finally happen. All DRM is built in to
Acrobat and Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat eBook Readers ‘bookshelf’ tools have
been moved across.