Adobe Acrobat is a family of application software and Web services developed by Adobe Systems to view, create, manipulate, print and manage files in Portable Document Format (PDF). Users of PDF files can read PDF on just about any platform – Windows, Mac and so on – as long as they have Acrobat Reader, which is available as a free download on the Internet for several platforms.
Adobe Acrobat Pro version 9 is an older program that I have, but it still is useful today. It’s not free. The free version of Acrobat is called Acrobat Reader which is able to open, read and print PDF files. If the PDF has a form in it you can fill out the form and send it back to the sender. This allows the sender to collect data from the receiver electronically; a very handy feature of PDF.
With Acrobat Pro 9 you can open PDFs, create PDFs, edit PDFs, add security to PDFs and create PDF forms. You can make your PDF accessible to those that are visually impaired. You can put passwords on a PDF as well as digitally sign them. Acrobat also has optical character recognition (OCR) built-in. With Acrobat you can make a Collection to organize your PDFs. What this does is creates pointers to all of you PDFs within Acrobat so you don’t have to go searching for your PDFs across folders, drives and remote computers. You can also merge several PDFs into one PDF.
On the left-hand side of the Acrobat Pro interface you have your Navigation pane, which by default is minimized. The top icon is for viewing your document pages. When you click it, the pane expands and shows you all of your pages in your document as thumbnail images. Very handy. You can expand the pane if you wish. You also have icons for bookmarks,
One way to create a PDF from many programs is to print to the PDF printer. If you are in Notepad for example, you can print the file to the PDF printer and Acrobat Pro will convert it to PDF automatically.
You can create a PDF from many types of files, even image files. For images, just open Acrobat Pro (or other version) and open the image in Acrobat. You can open up a MS Word file from within Acrobat and Acrobat will automatically convert that file to a PDF file. You just have to Save it.
If you are in need of creating a document with a lot of text, it will be easier to start the document as a Word document instead of starting it as a PDF file in Acrobat. Editing text is easier in Word than in Acrobat.
Combine/Merge
The Acrobat Combine function (the second button from the left on the task bar near the top of the screen) allows you to merge several documents into one PDF file. These documents can have different page sizes. One can be 8.5 by 11 and the other could be legal size document and the third could be a poster (image). Acrobat will stitch all three together into the order that you want. Acrobat will maintain the size and orientation of those three documents. This is a great feature of PDFs. You can put a very large graphic or spreadsheet into a PDF that has a regular 8.5 by 11-page size. You can also add videos to your PDF files. You can add sound files to your PDF files. You can add Flash files as well. Acrobat also has a 3D tool.
Also under the Combine button is the ability to create a Portfolio.
You can try an online service to work with your PDF files. Give www.ilovepdf.com a try. I love PDF can compress your PDF files so that they are smaller. This is more convenient for uploading and downloading from the web.