Chapter 2. Using Acrobat Viewers

In Chapter 1 you got a feel for some of the tools and menu commands provided in Acrobat Standard and Acrobat Pro, and Acrobat Pro Extended. If you're a PDF author and you use Acrobat Standard or Pro, or Pro Extended, knowing the capabilities of one viewer versus another is important for both job efficiency and productivity, as well as usefulness to the end user. You may want to add multimedia to a PDF document. Therefore, you need to know what authoring tool is needed to import video and sound. You may be sending out a document for review and want to solicit comments. Therefore, you need to know what viewer a user needs to send comments back to you.

At times you may find that none of the Acrobat products can help you do some editing tasks needed in your workflow. Fortunately, you have options for acquiring Acrobat plug-ins developed by third-party manufacturers that add much more functionality to the Acrobat tools and menu commands.

Many of the chapters ahead give you an idea of the distinctions between Acrobat Standard and Acrobat Pro, and Acrobat Pro Extended and the tools accessible from one viewer versus the other. This chapter introduces you to the Acrobat viewers, points out some differences among them, and shows you how to use Acrobat plug-ins when you need more features than the viewers provide.

Viewer Distinctions

Adobe Reader, Acrobat Standard (Windows only in version 8 and 9), Acrobat Pro, and Acrobat Pro Extended (Windows only) are designed ...

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