Adobe Acrobat Pro XI review

Tom Arah Read more October 8, 2012

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£378

Price when reviewed

Most people know Acrobat through the free Adobe Reader application that lets you view PDFs across all major computing platforms. And with the latest reader offering advanced capabilities such as form filling, document signing and commenting, you might wonder what else the new Acrobat XI Pro offers to justify its hefty price tag.

The key difference between Reader and Pro (and the cheaper, £255 Acrobat Standard) is the ability to create PDFs. Between the standalone Distiller, the universal print driver, the ability to open and convert a wide range of files (including 3D and CAD), the built-in scanning and OCR capabilities and its range of integrated Office add-ons, which now offer improved content protection control, Acrobat XI Pro has all the bases covered.

The new features in this version start with a simpler, more powerful set of tools for combining files into a single PDF, including the option to load files directly from cloud providers such as SharePoint, Office 365 and Adobe’s own Acrobat.com. In Acrobat X, the focus was on producing high-impact, interactive “PDF portfolios”. With Flash no longer flavour of the month, however, this capability has been downplayed.

Form handling also sees a host of major improvements. Previously, you had to use the intimidating LiveCycle Designer to create forms, but you can now create forms from scratch or by customising templates using the friendlier FormsCentral. To benefit from this you have to sign up for Adobe’s online FormsCentral service, which offers a basic subscription for free, and this allows forms to be published as both distributed PDFs and centralised web forms, with responses automatically collected and accessible from the browser.

That’s not, though. Using the new Sign panel, typed, hand-drawn, image-based or certificate-based digital signatures can be quickly added to forms, and with the “Get others to sign” tab PDFs can be uploaded to EchoSign (offering free and paid subscriptions) for others to sign. After online signing, which doesn’t require an account, PDF copies are automatically emailed to relevant parties, and a backup copy stored centrally in your EchoSign account. Previously, getting documents and contracts printed, distributed, signed and agreed could take weeks; now it takes minutes.

By its nature, PDF is a fixed document format, but that doesn’t mean it has to be the end of the workflow as Acrobat’s extensive commenting and review capabilities demonstrate. Now, Acrobat XI Pro goes a stage further and lets you edit existing PDFs using the new Edit Text and Images tool. Particularly impressive is the way that Acrobat XI Pro can reflow paragraph text as you edit, although this does depend on the quality of the original PDF creator and the complexity of the layout.

It’s possible to extract this content for re-use, too, with Acrobat XI Pro extending output options from Word and Excel to PowerPoint as well. Again, the process is simple and surprisingly effective, with elements common to all pages assigned to a master slide. Don’t expect miracles, though: if you really want to encourage re-use, you’re better off simply including the original file in the PDF to begin with.

With PDFs involved in so many different tasks, from standard document exchange through workgroup collaboration to advanced form handling, signing, archiving and commercial print production, the danger is that workflows can become over-complicated. Here, the new ability for IT departments to customise what capabilities are made available to end users should prove handy.

Acrobat Pro XI’s series of newly revamped Action wizards, which walk users through important workflows, should help here too. Perhaps the most significant of these is Optimize for Web and Mobile, which automatically converts colours to sRGB and embeds fonts to ensure consistent display across all devices, before compressing files to keep them lightweight.

It’s worth noting that Adobe has also been hard at work improving its touch-optimised readers for iOS, Android and Windows 8, ensuring all the new features are supported – including FormsCentral and EchoSign. That’s important, as ultimately, it’s these free reader apps – and the new free cloud services that link into them – that provide Acrobat with its cross-platform and cross-device universality, and so justify the hefty price tag.

Acrobat XI Pro isn’t just the most capable application for producing and consuming PDFs, then, it’s the key to unlocking the full potential of Adobe’s all-encompassing, Acrobat-based PDF ecosystem. Its high price mean it won’t be for everyone, but for large organisations, the efficiency and productivity gains Acrobat Pro XI and its cloud-based support services bring will quickly cover the cost.