Adobe® Acrobat® 9 PDF Bible

Chapter 4. Getting Familiar with Adobe Reader

As a PDF author you need to be aware of the capabilities and the limitations of the Adobe Reader software. In some situations you can distribute PDF documents to users of the free Adobe Reader software for active participation in your workflow without all your clients and colleagues needing to purchase the full version of Acrobat Standard, Acrobat Pro, or Acrobat Pro Extended. In other situations where the Adobe Reader software does not contain tools or commands to properly edit a file for a given workflow, you may need to recommend to others which commercial viewer they need to purchase. Regardless of where you are with PDF creation and editing, at one time or another you'll be called upon to explain some of the differences between Adobe Reader and the other viewers.

Adobe Reader has evolved and each new upgrade offers users much more functionality than previous versions. Features that users have long requested such as the ability to save form data and add digital signatures were added in Adobe Reader 8. Two more features requested by many users involved having a method for converting application documents to PDF and a nononsense easy method for sharing files. Adobe Reader 9, combined with the new online Acrobat.com service, addresses these user requests.

Setting Some Critical Preferences

Like the Acrobat viewers, Adobe Reader has an enormous number of different preference options designed to add more functionality to the program and to ...