Adobe have been developing applications like acrobat in order to help in the creation of global file formats like PDF files. Acrobat has been the only way to create these PDF Files also known as "Portable Document Format" which consists of files that contain only text, images or both.

A common use for this application on a day to day basis is with industries like Graphic Design / Print mediums. Designers or printers can create a design for a customer then send it to print via PDF file format for large volume printing. These files can include many different format preferences like bleed and crop marks.

Now at the 8th edition to the acrobat family adobe have finally released a new version designed with many new features. We were able to get access to a trial version of the application from the adobe website to do this review.

After the installation process was complete we started by doing up a sample image in photoshop elements then created a PDF file from the image we had designed up. At first there didnt seem to be much difference between version 7 and version 8. All the layouts and styling for print preferences were exactly the same, the pdf print engine was still a little slow but the outcome was very interesting.

Collegues of mine had used every version of Acrobat Professional since it was released in to the market place almost 10 years ago. They had all said that this format would be the best to use for almost every application when it came to printing and storing files. The only gripe they ever had with different versions was the appauling file compression. The last good known version was version 5 as it had the best compression seen to date.

Knowing that version 5 was the best release to date we thought that compression would be the best thing to test. While we were sceptical as to whether it has improved or whether it was just the same old compression we created a 30MB photoshop file and tested the compression with both acrobat version 5 and version 8. The results were suprising to say the least.

Version 5 created a PDF file which was approximately 4.5MB in size at 300dpi and version 8 had created a 3.9MB file. While this does not seem like much compression nor does it seem like a huge advantage we did manage to find a way to compress the pdf files a further 20% with version 8. This was not possible in version 5 as distiller was not as comprehensive as version 8's distiller.

We thought that since this was the case we would try the pdf file created from acrobat version 5 through acrobat distiller. The result was not as impressive nor was the quality as good. The newly created hybrid version 5/8 pdf file had only obtained another 4% compression but the images showed signs of JPEG compression and grainyness.

Further advancements have been made to acrobat 8 with the implimentation of shared reviews, the ability to remove headers, footers and watermarks has been compiled in to acrobat 8 making it very attractive if you have printed a pdf file from word or a website. Another great feature is the use of security policies and permissions.

Acrobat 8 Reader has now got a new interface that is somewhat refreshing and intuiative. The ability to create pdf files from outlook that can be used for archiving is another feature which would be good for large organisations. Another good application which this could be used for is for those who have massive outlook files. Doing this could reduce the overall Outlook PST file size as you would be able to delete those emails that you have archieved.

Acrobat 8 is definitly worth its weight in gold and should be considered for those of you out there that create PDF files regularly. This application should not be overlooked when choosing a PDF creation application.