Who's got Acrobat 7? [Archive] - Desktop Publishing Forum

Michael Rowley

02-16-2005, 02:27 PM

Mac:

I should elaborate. Acrobat Reader 7 can now deal with 'comments' put in a PDF file by people with Acrobat 7—fair enough. But if people with older versions of Windows can't use Acrobat Reader 7, they'll be directed by Adobe to Acrobat Reader 6 (or even earlier versions); presumably, putting comments in will be effective only if most users have at least Windows NT5 and remember to get the latest version of Acrobat Reader (which they seldom do, in my experience).

The same goes for the Mac, but I don't know where the dividing line is for that: Mac OS 10, perhaps.

Steve Rindsberg

02-16-2005, 05:15 PM

From www.adobe.com:
Adobe Reader 7.0 system requirements
Windows
Intel® Pentium® processor
Microsoft® Windows 2000 with Service Pack 2, Windows XP Professional or Home Edition, or Windows XP Tablet PC Edition
=== etc
So Win2000 (nt5) is the starting point, yes. Or on Mac, OS X v.10.2.8 or 10.3

As I understand it, people with Acrobat 7 can enable Reader 7 users to comment the PDF and allow the comments to be saved, so you could exchange review comments with users who only have Reader, not full Acrobat. IF they have the latest version, that is.

Cristen Gillespie

02-16-2005, 07:37 PM

As I understand it, people with Acrobat 7 can enable Reader 7 users to comment the PDF and allow the comments to be saved, so you could exchange review comments with users who only have Reader, not full Acrobat. IF they have the latest version, that is.

But it appears they can only do it through their e-mail or browser. I d'loaded the full version of Reader to the iMac, but it can't comment unless/until someone sends me an e-mail with permissions included for commenting. Taking a normal pdf (where I can comment easily in Acro6 Pro), and reading it in Reader7 is about all I'm allowed to do. The sort of instructions mention e-mail and browsers knowingly making the commenting tools available then.

Michael Rowley

02-17-2005, 08:12 AM

Steve:

'exchange review comments with users who only have Reader, not full Acrobat. IF they have the latest version'

Having Acrobat Reader 7 is a very obvious limitation, but a very important one: many people are not using Windows 2000 or XP yet, at least in the UK, where they tend to upgrade only when they get a new computer. Even many organizations with networks haven't yet changed from Windows 2000.

Steve Rindsberg

02-17-2005, 07:45 PM

But it appears they can only do it through their e-mail or browser.>>

They do refer to email or browser based reviews, but email woud mean sending an attached PDF; it seems that if the "owner" (with Acrobat 7) has enabled the feature, you can use commenting tools and the comments get attached to the PDF and transmitted back with it. Clever way around the issue of allowing/not allowing Reader to save PDFs. No saves, just attachments.

Steve Rindsberg

02-17-2005, 07:47 PM

Having Acrobat Reader 7 is a very obvious limitation, but a very important one: many people are not using Windows 2000 or XP yet, at least in the UK>>

I've no idea of the numbers here but quite a few people still seem to be on Win98 here as well.

curveto

02-20-2005, 06:57 PM

...Upgrade at the same number of pounds sterling as the number of US dollars charged in the USA

You're kidding, right?

I guess it'll help ADBE's next financial report (especially for Acrobat). ;)

Michael Rowley

02-21-2005, 06:35 AM

Curveto:

'You're kidding, right?'

Not at all: $159 in the USA, £158 point something in the UK. It's true that the British price includes 17.5% VAT (which those VAT-registered can get back), but it still represents a substantial mark-uo. There nothing unusual in this, for UK hardware suppliers do it much of the time, but making people get software from the UK instead of from the USA (fonts are supplied from Adobe USA) gets my back up.

Keith Risler

03-09-2005, 10:03 PM

Curveto:
....
Not at all: .... it still represents a substantial mark-up. There nothing unusual in this, for UK hardware suppliers do it much of the time, but making people get software from the UK instead of from the USA (fonts are supplied from Adobe USA) gets my back up.

What does seem quite unusual to me is that Adobe has limited Adobe Reader v7 to Windows 2000 and Windows XP users, while at the same time attempting to promote Acrobat as a global document standard. It is reasonable to suppose that there are many more computers running Windows 98 or earlier that Windows 2000 and XP combined, Microsoft marketing rhetoric aside.

Adobe seems to have blundered royally in this respect.

Adobe would be well-advised to take a lesson from Sonic, which as just announced that it is making its DVD authoring software available for Windows 98 systems--software that previously was sold only for Windows 2000 and XP.

Franca

03-09-2005, 10:15 PM

Adobe would be well-advised to take a lesson from Sonic, which as just announced that it is making its DVD authoring software available for Windows 98 systems--software that previously was sold only for Windows 2000 and XP.That's very unusual these days. I don't think even Microsoft cares about Win 98 any more so why should anyone else? Not that I don't think it's a great idea to try to support aging operating systems and software, but I doubt it's very rewarding. Hardly any of the software I use works with Win 98 any more. Sigh. The last system we had running Win 98SE had a hard drive failure and we caved in and went to XP Pro all around.

Keith Risler

03-09-2005, 10:39 PM

.... Microsoft cares about Win 98 any more so why should anyone else? Not that I don't think it's a great idea to try to support aging operating systems and software... all around.

I suspect that Sonic's decision is a recognition that, again putting the rhetoric of sellers aside, people are sitting on their PCs and their extant software licenses. PC sales have been in a slump for years, not coincidentally after Microsoft's first leaps to Product Activation. The recent MS announcement that they will be digitally vetting all Windows 2000 and XP systems for valid Windows licences before allowing updates or other downloads come June is another factor in my view.

There are a lot of people out there, myself not included, whom MS claims are using illegal Windows copies. Many of these users, and others who don't want to use copy locked software but are otherwise legal users, will not feel the urge to upgrade.

On the issue of aging software, back before Year 2000 I penned a magazine piece on Y2K software planning; it was evident that some large companies were running some code that was decades old on their big computers. This raises the questions as to when software is aging; I suspect that at 10 years one might be able to say that PC software is aged. But as I said, for some companies some code is still good to go at 25+ years of age. That might be the operative precedent for reasonable durability expectations, and sooner or later the market will hammer this home by itself.

End users are now seeing software as a tool, not as must-have hype. Could this be the reason IBN sold its PC business recently--because IBM senses that the desktop market is now mature?

Incidentally, if one surveys the purveyors of quality smaller software packages overall, one does see a trend to retain support for Windows 98 and sometimes even Windows 95. I recently encountered a 2005-made LG CD-RW drive that supports Windows XP, 2000, 98, 95 and Windows 3.1 (Although it just reads CDs in Windows 3.1).

There are lots of bread and butter utility apps out there that support back to Windows 98 at least, as well. Myself I see this trend of people to not upgrade systems as quite problematic.

I recently converted a long book to PDF for a client, only to have to now caution that Adobe Reader 7 works only with Win2K/XP. The work began long before Reader 7's limitations were known. I can be fairly sure that the client will not be completely happy about this, as it implies the "universal" work they paid for ain't quite as universal as they might reasonably have expected.

Michael Rowley

03-10-2005, 07:46 AM

Keith:

'What does seem quite unusual to me is that Adobe has limited Adobe Reader v7 to Windows 2000 and Windows XP users'

Adobe Reader is distributed only by Adobe: that means that the countless Web sites having the by now familiar 'Adobe Reader' sign only provide links. If you follow the link, you're asked your operating system, and you get the version of Reader that you can use. I don't know precisely which features you'll miss if you get a version earlier than v. 7, but you'll still be able to read PDF documents.

Keith Risler

03-10-2005, 08:01 AM

Keith:

Adobe Reader is distributed only by Adobe: that means that the countless Web sites having the by now familiar 'Adobe Reader' sign only provide links. If you follow the link, you're asked your operating system, and you get the version of Reader that you can use. I don't know precisely which features you'll miss if you get a version earlier than v. 7, but you'll still be able to read PDF documents.

Yes, indeed that is the case. The problem is that Reader 7 corrects to a major degree the very slow load of Reader 6, as well as the fact that for the client the hope was that as PDF evolves they could serve all of their book's readers using the PDF approach. Clearly as PDF evolves this capabilty will wane as long as Adobe keeps dropping OS support.

Acrobat Reader was once available for a much larger range of OSs than it is now, which is all quite inexplicable to me.

One good point is that Adobe does allow Reader to be distributed if one applies for their free distribution license for Reader via the Web, so one can include Reader 6 and Reader 7 for Wndows on CD when creating a CD for distribution.

Michael Rowley

03-10-2005, 08:34 AM

Keith:

'Acrobat Reader was once available for a much larger range of OSs'

I haven't looked lately, but I hung on to my old computer for about four or five years using Windows for Workgroups 3.11; my next computer had Windows Pro 2000. So I missed Windows 95 and 98 entirely, but during that time I read PDF files, because I always had the Reader appropriate to my computer (Reader v. 3).

The only thing I object to is that Adobe sets the version too high if you encrypt a PDF. This can be fatal, because a lot of readers use old versions of Reader, although they could use a newer version. Most seem to have stopped at v. 4.

Richard Hunt

03-10-2005, 12:58 PM

What does seem quite unusual to me is that Adobe has limited Adobe Reader v7 to Windows 2000 and Windows XP users, while at the same time attempting to promote Acrobat as a global document standard. It is reasonable to suppose that there are many more computers running Windows 98 or earlier that Windows 2000 and XP combined, Microsoft marketing rhetoric aside.

Actually, it seems quite logical to me. The people who are going to bung their money on the counter (and 135 pounds plus 17.4% VAT for an upgrade is a lot) for the full or pro versions are not likely to be running a seven year old operating system. Cuts down their support problems too.

Richard Hunt

John Spragens

03-10-2005, 01:11 PM

Michael Rowley

03-10-2005, 02:20 PM

Richard:

'The people who are going to bung their money on the counter . . . for the full or pro versions are not likely to be running a seven year old operating system'

Yes, only those that want either the full capablities of Acrobat 7 or want to have the (slightly) enhanced commenting facilities are going to buy it at first. For the commenting, the only people that will be able to make comments are those with the free Reader 7 (or fellow Acrobat 7 owners). This is a considerable restriction, but organizations have long changed to Windows NT5 at least. The poor can go on using Word as usual (whose full commenting facilities are confined to Word 11 anyway).

Keith Risler

03-10-2005, 02:46 PM

Actually, it seems quite logical to me. The people who are going to bung their money on the counter (and 135 pounds plus 17.4% VAT for an upgrade is a lot) for the full or pro versions are not likely to be running a seven year old operating system. Cuts down their support problems too.

Richard Hunt

This thinking is okay so fars as it goes, but it misses the point with respect to Acrobat documents that are to be distributed to a worldwide audience, such as the book I recently repurposed to Acrobat. It will be used by scholars and regulatory agencies worldwide. In such circumstances it does matter that Adobe has limited the newset features in Reader to Windows 2000 and Windows XP, since one can be certain many of these users will not be on thge latest OSs except in major first-world markets.

One of the curious aspects of the PC paradigm for communications is that it is only now entering a market maturity phase where it's no longer possible to sell indefinitely just to new or wealthy markets and stay in business.

Second tier software makers like Sonic seem to be coming to this realization, as is the LG company in marketing a CD-RW drive that is supported back to Windows 95. There is little point in passing up on markets when these represent potential sales that keep you in business.

Unfortunately the sales model of the North American software industry has beento sell new product to new buyers and to deep-pocketed corporate customers. This doesn't work well when one is desktop-publishing a scholarly reference work for serious use by large numbers of people.

Michael Rowley

03-10-2005, 03:17 PM

Keith:

'the book I recently repurposed to Acrobat'

I should have thought that a e-book (if it is one) could be published perfectly well in a version of Acrobat that doesn't contain all the features that require Adobe Reader 7. Most of the new features are either refinements in the sort of files used for printing or improvements in the rather crude facilities for commenting—or so it seems to me. What features would you want from Acrobat 7's set of features?

Keith Risler

03-10-2005, 04:07 PM

Keith:

'the book I recently repurposed to Acrobat'

.... What features would you want from Acrobat 7's set of features?

It is less a question of features per se than the implication of the shifting support for the full Acrobat program, with an evident narrowing of supported systems overall. Although a need to use an index file for reliable searches is the primary issue that raises compatibility worries.

The client's long-run goal is to employ Acrobat in-house, to re-issue its book on its own when needed, so the client also has an interest in using software that can create widely compatible results.

This question bears most directly on a part of the project that is critical to it. The requirement was for the book manuscript to be sourced from and kept within WordPerfect 11 and later WordPerfect 12. The book's pages have to be indexed via hyperlinks that link from a conventional book index at the back of the book, which is all set up in WordPerfect. But the integral index with hyperlinks to pages as created in WordPerfect must survive and be functional in the final PDF. This requirement appears to eiliminate simply publishing to Distiller as WordPerfect index hyperlinks are lost, although a complex but unproven macro was offered to me via a user in the WordPerfect Universe Web site user forums that appears as though it might get around this problem.

And, the book had to be searchable using Acrobat's built-in search feature.

The project ran into a limitation in that there is a little known bug in WordPerfect that results in PDFs created using the WordPerfect 11 and 12 Publish to PDF feature being unreliable for searches done without the benefit of the specialized Acrobat-created Index file that is usable via Adobe Reader's Advanced search feature. Essentially, if an Index is not tied to the PDF when a Reader search is done, the Reader-returned search results will link to the wrong pages.

And as noted, the project for technical reasons had to use the Publish To PDF feature in WordPerfect to properly preserve the intergral book-style hyperlinked index.

So the project was left being dependent on the use of Acrobat Reader 6 or Reader 7 because of the index issue. Thus the ability of the user to run a version of Reader that can use the index is essential, meaning the user has to be at a certain Reader version level to search the book effectively.

Steve Rindsberg

03-10-2005, 05:18 PM

Ouch! I don't have RAID, but that's a good thing to know.

Michael Rowley

03-11-2005, 11:10 AM

Keith:

‘the project was left being dependent on the use of Acrobat Reader 6 or Reader 7 because of the index issue’

That restricts you to Windows 98SE or ME (or later) users of course. I was not aware that Acrobat Reader 5 did not have the 'advanced search' facility (I've simply forgotten what Reader 5 had), and since I don't use WordPerfect I didn't know about the bug. Is WordPerfect's ‘Publish to PDF’ feature actually programmed by WordPefect, or is it in fact an Adobe add-on? I ask, because a similar feature is supplied by Adobe for Word, and it isn't perfect, though usable.

I won't ask why your client chose WordPefect for the book, but most publishers would have chosen Word or perhaps FrameMaker.

Richard Hunt

03-11-2005, 11:47 AM

I think I will have to spring for it - much of my work involves receiving big PDFs of German magazines, and I then have to flag up articles as suitable for translation or not, extract and translate the text. My main customer has upgraded so it is important to be compatible.

Richard

Michael Rowley

03-11-2005, 03:50 PM

Richard:

'I think I will have to spring for it'

If you've got a strong incentive for buying the upgrade, that lessens the pain. But it is always galling to have to pay over the odds for something that is much cheaper from USA—makes one inclined to accept one of those offers from eBay, even though you may strongly suspect it's pirated.

Steve Rindsberg

03-11-2005, 09:28 PM

>>I was not aware that Acrobat Reader 5 did not have the 'advanced search' facility

It has, but if you create the index in Acrobat 6, it's not compatible with earlier versions of Reader.

Michael Rowley

03-12-2005, 07:49 AM

Steve:

‘if you create the index in Acrobat 6, it's not compatible with earlier versions of Reader'

Oh. Then the only solution for users of Acrobat Reader earlier than v. 6 is to provide a good visible index, which, after all, is all they would have with a printed book. That would require an expert indexer, oherwise the index would have an awful lot of correct, but trivial, entries—rather like the sort of index that Acrobat 6 or 7 might give.

Keith Risler

03-12-2005, 09:02 AM

Indeed, the text had a requirement for a conventional index as well as a digital searchable index. It was a strict requirement that the text be left in its WordPerfect source form, since this allows scholars who work on the text in the future to update it directly.

By keeping the source material in its orginal, native state, a process that avoids extended labor between each republication is avoided.

On the index issue, the work is a very specialized technical reference and by design indexs only some 25 terms which have been standardized in the text for many years, and maintained in the text by the scholar who edits it.

As such, a professional indexer was not needed for the project.

Incidentally, Acrobat has what seems a bigger deficiency in searching than may be imagined. Adobe evidently changed the source of its index component, which creates the version compatibility for Acrobat indexes. But the indexed search capability can't do meaninfgul Boolean searches within documents. It returns all of the pages in the PDF file that have any one of the Boolean search terms, at least from what testing suggests.

Steve Rindsberg

03-12-2005, 09:02 PM

>>Oh. Then the only solution for users of Acrobat Reader earlier than v. 6 is to provide a good visible index, which, after all, is all they would have with a printed book. That would require an expert indexer, oherwise the index would have an awful lot of correct, but trivial, entries—rather like the sort of index that Acrobat 6 or 7 might give. >>

Or provide an index made in Acrobat 5 or earlier, which Reader 6 should be able to use (I'm not sure of Reader 7).

An expert indexer would probably produce better results than either, but you'd then have the problem of converting the index into clickable links (though depending on the app used to produce the PDF, this might be automatic).

But an expert indexer isn't likely to come cheap. For many types of document the choice won't be "Expert indexer vs. Acrobat index" but "Acrobat index vs. No index"

However trivial the entries, a working Acrobat index beats "peer & {pagedown}" hands down.

Michael Rowley

03-13-2005, 02:31 PM

Keith:

‘the indexed search capability can't do meaninfgul Boolean searches within documents’

Not much of a surprise, because the Help in Reader 7 says that it can’t do Boolean searches in individual documents. However, all the other search options are available.

Michael Rowley

03-13-2005, 02:45 PM

Steve:

‘you'd then have the problem of converting the index into clickable links'

I was thinking of the sort of index a human reads and turns to the page indicated. Clickable links could be provided for those that can make use of them. Of course, that would mean that the pagination could not be altered without updating the visible index.

Actually, I think Keith R. is underestimating the prevalence of computers that can run Windows 2000 or even XP: quite an old model (mine, for instance!) is good enough, and there are plenty of copies of the software floating about in the world, though it may be tactless to inquire too closely about their provenance.

Steve Rindsberg

03-14-2005, 02:58 PM

was thinking of the sort of index a human reads and turns to the page indicated. Clickable links could be provided for those that can make use of them. Of course, that would mean that the pagination could not be altered without updating the visible index.>>

True, but given the size of the task, you'd want to create the index links automatically (and some of the acrobat plugins for Word et al can do this, I believe). If you then confine pagination-changing edits to the source document rather than Acrobat itself, recreating the PDF would recreate the index links.

Otherwise it's too hellish a job to consider. Not w/o bionic wrists and a boredom threshhold usually exhibited by mummies and the like.

>>Actually, I think Keith R. is underestimating the prevalence of computers that can run Windows 2000 or even XP

Capable of running and running are two different matters; Keith probably has to rely on the latter. It's asking a lot to expect users to update Reader so as to enjoy one's Magnum PDF Opus. Asking them to update their OS goes long and then some.

Elly

11-16-2005, 02:30 PM

I have a problem. I am attempting to publish a book with a POD company. To open their requirement documents I need Adobe Acrobat Reader. I had 3.0 and it didn't work. I downloaded 7.0. At first, I was able to open some of the files they sent to me. Soon after, I rec'd a message from Adobe and agreed to download an update 7.0.5 When it was finished two emblems showed on my desktop "tmb" and when I clicked on them they said they were not coded correctly, so I lsent them to recycle bin. My attempts to open the pages now, only result in the entire freeze-up of my computer. I tried to upload my book in the templates the POD sent to me, but they wouldn't upload. Can you please help?

Michael Rowley

11-16-2005, 02:58 PM

Elyse:

I had 3.0 and it didn't work

Acrobat Reader v. 3 is a bit hoary (it worked with Windows 3!), but is v. 7 the right version for your computer? Try v. 5, which you can get by choice of any Windows version before W. 2000 or the equivalent Mac.

Also: you haven't got Zone Alarm Pro and Windows have you? ZA's update recently has made Windows (not the computer) stop repeatedly, and after reporting the fault to ZA & MS, MS opened a page in the web telling me that the culprit was ZA and that 'ZA's engineers were aware of the problem'.

Stephen Owades

11-16-2005, 09:34 PM

And watch out about that activation if you have a RAID. You can use up all your activations quickly and there's no fix for it, according to an article (http://www.gripe2ed.com/scoop/story/2005/3/8/0483/05937) on Ed Foster's Gripelog.
That's a pretty old article (March 2005). I had problems with the activation process in Acrobat 7, on my non-RAID IBM ThinkPad with two hard drives installed. Adobe's activation people spent many hours on the phone with me, sending me various patches and test procedures, until we finally got things working. Apparently I was suffering from a relative of the problem that occurs with RAID systems, and they have made a great deal of progress in dealing with these situations. In fact, Adobe sent me a volume-licensed CD "just in case," but in the end we got the regular activation working on my machine.

I would suggest that if you encounter this sort of problem, call the licensing people at Adobe before you run out of valid activations, rather than afterward. It will probably make the negotiations easier. If anyone is getting a runaround from Adobe on the phone, let me know and I'll point the right person in their direction.