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| Acrobat 4.0 | |
 If you are paying as much in rent for your stored files as you are for
your office space, you may want to consider storing your files (at least your newly
archivable files) electronically. Adobe Acrobat is a program suite designed to convert files to portable document format (.pdf), and to modify existing .pdf files. (A similarly named program, Adobe Acrobat Reader, is used just for reading .pdf files, and is distributed freely by Adobe). Pdf files you create on the Windows platform can be read on a Macintosh platform, and vice versa. Because the free Acrobat Reader is available for so many operating systems, some courts (my federal court in Albuquerque, N.M. for example), are allowing and even encouraging electronic filing of all documents in the PDF format. The court documents can then be viewed by anyone (with a password in the case of my federal court) over the World Wide Web. Whether your goal is archiving, electronic filing or both, there are two tasks of interest for the law office which this software performs: 1) converting documents originating on your computer into PDF format, and 2) converting paper documents to PDF. For each of these tasks there are two objectives: first, to create an "exact" duplicate of the original -- one that can be printed out on any computer platform (a substitute original, if you will), and second, creating or maintaining text that can be searched en masse to find something without reading every document in the file. These tasks, and one of the above objectives, is accomplished routinely with Acrobat. Acrobat 4.0 is a major upgrade in usability over Acrobat version 3 -- finally, a version everyone can use comfortably. Converting documents is very straightforward with this version. The Acrobat suite of programs contains two programs to convert files to PDF: PDF Writer for text-only documents, and Distiller for documents which contain graphics or text and graphics. To create a .pdf file from any text document you create on your computer (word processing or spreadsheet, etc.), simply drag the file from Windows Explorer and drop it onto the Acrobat 4 icon. Voila! Instant .pdf! In Word or Excel, Acrobat adds "Create Adobe PDF" to the file menu. Click it and a menu pops up with your choices of creation (PDF Writer vs. Distiller) along with a host of other options. If you use Corel WordPerfect, you will have to click the mouse a few more times, but you get to the same point fast. Installation of the Acrobat program creates two printer icons in your printer folder Adobe PDF Writer and Adobe Distiller 4.0. Just print to one of these printers and you will end up with a .pdf file. Using Distiller is a two step process: First, you create an Adobe Postscript file, then you create a .pdf. The improvement in version 4 is that you probably will not realize that it is a two-step process because the program does it all at once. Whichever process you use, you are left with a substitute original which can be printed at any time on any platform for which Acrobat Reader has been ported. Converting paper documents to .pdf requires that you first get the form and substance of the document into your computer. This is done with a scanner and software. Here again, version 4 is a major improvement over version 3. Acrobat 4 supports multiple-page scanning (a major improvement over 3), and the optical character recognition (OCR) interface for identifying and correcting words is greatly improved. Even with my inexpensive Logitech Freescan parallel port scanner, which has a small-capacity document feeder built in, I just dropped the multipage document into the scanner, clicked a few buttons, and had a searchable PDF version of the document. The Acrobat suite of programs contains another extremely useful program called Catalog. With it, you can create a full-text searchable index of your PDF documents, which comes in handy when storing your PDFs on a compact disc for archiving. Because the PDF file can be annotated and marked up, and is separate from the file from which it was created, recognition of Acrobat 4's usefulness as an inter-office collaboration tool is also growing steadily. Remember, however, that changes can only be made by owners of Acrobat, and not by those with just Reader. Technical support for Acrobat via speaking with a live human being is not freely available, but you will probably never need to call after completing the tutorial. If Acrobat 4 is not yet a must-have program for the law office, it will be very soon. |
Adobe Software (800) 833-6687 www.adobe.com Windows (all), Mac $249 Reviewed by Steve Schmidt, attorney, Singer, Smith & Williams, Albuquerque, N.M. PROS CONS VERDICT
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