Adobe Acrobat 6.0 Standard Edition [OLD VERSION]

I didn't waste any additional time seeing how slow it was at its own tasks. I'll take everyone's word for it.

Less than one day on the machine. I've gone back to 5.0.


It's bader than James Brown (help me now- OW!)   April 19, 2004
 10 out of 12 found this review helpful

My personal favorite with SE is when you open a link on a web page that's a pdf and acrobat doesn't appear, and the page locks up, and as you're rebooting you notice that as the IE window closed there was an Adobe dialog box behind IE. Sadly, you could not get to it because IE was locked.

My next favorite part of 6.0 has to do with the time it takes from clicking a PDF on a fast server to the display time. The load time on Adobe can only be compared to the time it takes to get the last passengers on a TWA flight to put their bagage up - pitifuly slow and you wonder what's wrong with it.

I can open Word, all 26 megs of its little memory hogging self, 3 times in the time it take acrobat to open on a cranky day. I have not figured out what makes Acrobat so inconsistant, it's insane.

In conclusion, my last peeve with this software is that many programs I deal with (cough Final Draft) when you are attempting to print a run, end up as 2 seperate PDF jobs that you have to go in and combine later. While this may not be Adobe's issue, it sure would be nice to be able to wait to finish the file until you're ready.


Acrobat 6.0 Standard is Slow and Lacks Critical Features!   February 17, 2004
 6 out of 6 found this review helpful

I am a big fan of Adobe. I am a Photshop addict and I use Acrobat frequently. However, I am very disappointed in the way Adobe has positioned Adobe Acrobat 6.0 Standard Edition. It seems as if Adobe intentionally crippled this product. Perhaps they did this so that corporations can deploy a version of Acrobat that doesn't make it as easy to edit unprotected PDFs, as is possible with 5.0. (This is a generous interpretation. Some people may conclude it's simply a bald-faced attempt at boosting revenue by forcing purchase of the more expensive Pro version.) I feel that the advertising material for this product does not fairly describe the limited feature set.

The first thing you notice is that the program is incredibly slow to start. This program should start as fast or faster than a word processor (i.e., Microsft Word), since it is used constantly mainly to read files.

Once you get over the interminable wait and have the program on your screen you immediately notice the deficiencies in the software. Acrobat 6.0 is missing many critical feature of Acrobat 5.0, including the catalog (index) and touch-up of objects (images). In addition (and amazingly), the pop-up search box is gone! To search inside a PDF requires launching an annoying pane that reduces the size of the window in which the PDF is displayed. Overall, I can't see that the product provides any enhanced usability. Even the "Read Out Loud" function is unusable because the speech is garbled. More irritations: The icons are too large, taking up excessive screen real estate. The column select function is missing; this was handy to properly select text in multi-column documents. (NOTE ADDED APRIL 1, 2004: After using the product for a while, I'm not sure that column select is really necessary in 6.0. Text selection may be more intelligent in this version of the program.)

NOTE ADDED APRIL 1, 2004: After using this product for several months, I have learned to like the was the search feature operates. Yes, invoking search does cause a large pane to pop-up on the right side of your screen, making it hard to read your document which is resized smaller. However, the results list provided by search gives you the context in which the search term is located and it is easy to jump to the desired point in your document. There are times that this type of search is much more useful than the jump through the document (Microsoft Word-like) search in Acrobat 5.0. However, the lack of the catalog (index) feature in Acrobat 6.0 is a major, major disadvantage. Adobe -- if you are listening -- the next version of Acrobat should have all three search capabilities: (1) catalog as in 5.0, (2) jump through the document search as in 5.0, and (3) results list search as in 6.0. For any given search situation, one of these search approaches will be superior. You really need all three. One final point: Integration of Acrobat 6.0 with Internet Explorer may be slightly better than for 5.0. Nevertheless, there are still times when running Acrobat 6.0 inside IE will hang your computer.


Very mixed feelings...   January 23, 2004
 14 out of 15 found this review helpful

I use PDFs a lot and I must say that quite often I turn to Free PDF software to actually do the tasks that Acrobat fails to do. One area I have always had a problem with is the formatting of some documents in size and sometimes Acrobat simply fails to recognize them and so I switch to the Free PDF software which has no problems doing this and is easier to use.

However if you are a pro PDF maker who wants to add sigs and links and notes and chapters and all the other function tags including security tags then I recommend this product hands down as the best one. I just find that it is not always the best PDF software package in the world, but a good one all the same.

I would not recommend buying this one just to make standard PDF files alone. If you want to touch up those file then this is what you need to do that right.


Avoid. Go with Scansoft PDF converter instead   December 17, 2003
 27 out of 35 found this review helpful

Too expensive and not good.
A better and cheaper way to manipulate PDF is to go with Scansoft PDF converter...for $49 the Scansoft product is much better.

check this out:http://www.scansoft.com/pdfconverter/