Acrobat 8 Pro improves some innovative new features.

Acrobat 8 Professional software empowers educators and students to reliably create, combine, share, and control media-rich Adobe PDF documents for easy, more secure communication, collaboration, and timesaving electronic workflows.

Acrobat 8 Professional allows you to add functionality to Adobe Reader by enabling extended usage rights in a particular PDF file. You can give users of the free Adobe Reader rights to review, comment and mark-up a PDF, save filled-in form data, and digitally sign the document either in an existing signature field (Adobe Reader 7) or anywhere on the page (Adobe Reader 8). Previously, the ability to sign and save PDF form data in Adobe Reader required Adobe's LiveCycle Reader Extensions Server, an enterprise product with a $75,000 price tag.

Adobe went to great lengths to ensure feature parity across platforms. Even so, Acrobat 8 Pro on the Mac is not equivalent in every way to the Windows version. For example, Acrobat 8 Pro for Windows can incorporate Adobe Flash, Windows Media, RealMedia, and QuickTime files in a PDF document. In the Mac version, support for including multimedia content is limited to QuickTime. However, Acrobat can play Flash, Windows Media 9, and RealMedia content created on a PC-if you have the software installed on your Mac.

With Acrobat 8 Professional, Adobe offers a redesigned, Universal version of its flagship application for creating and distributing PDF (Portable Document Format) content. The new release focuses on and underscores the growing importance of collaboration and digital document management.

With this version, which will be part of Creative Suite 3, Mac users now have only one choice: Acrobat 8 Professional. Once you get over the loss of the Standard edition, you'll probably love what you see. First and foremost, it looks and feels like a true Mac OS X application. It sports a redesigned, task-oriented user interface with customizable toolbars. And, on Intel Macs, Acrobat 8 Professional feels remarkably faster than its predecessor.

Acrobat 8 Pro introduces some innovative new features. For example, the new Combine Files wizard makes it easy to arrange a set of files and merge them into a single PDF document or assemble them into a PDF package (a container for multiple documents). A PDF package preserves the security settings of the original files, such as digital signatures, and can protect its contents with additional security features.

Acrobat 8 Pro can also create a blank-page document, and it gives you some basic tools to add text to it right away.

I'll state this upfront: I find many of the changes in Acrobat 8 Professional inexplicable. Although the entire package is fairly pricey ($499; upgrade $159) and was traditionally aimed at high-level users and print production folks, this version's "improvements' are aimed at, um, well, I couldn't really identify a target audience. Some of the changes may confuse and frustrate long-time print-production professionals while adding features that most businesses may not need.

Acrobat 8 Professional software empowers educators and students to reliably create, combine, share, and control media-rich Adobe PDF documents for easy, more secure communication, collaboration, and timesaving electronic workflows.