This Monday, Adobe fired the Acrobat X cannon out across the interwebs. You may have felt odd vibrations emanating from your screen creating a feeling that something was going to affect your career-long affection with PDF’s… or that feeling could just be some indigestion from that lunch burrito. Either way, a new version of Acrobat is coming out soon, version 10… aka, Acrobat X.
Acrobat X Reader Collaboration
Acrobat has propagated Acrobat.com into the Acrobat X interface. For users that only have Reader, this could workout to be great tool. A sidebar in Acrobat X Reader allows you to convert files to PDF, plus make them available online to share and collaborate with a team. For the free account you get 1 online Workspace, 5 PDF conversions total, 3-person web conferencing, online office applications, and forum-based support. Nearly forces you to have to upgrade if you would use this a lot. The Basic price will run you $14.99 for unlimited PDF conversions and 20 workspaces. (pssst! there are free PDF creators out there too!)
Acrobat X 3D. Where is it?
I asked Brian Domingo from Edelman, the Adobe PR agency a couple questions about the future of 3D in Acrobat and (spoiler!) how Tech Soft plans to deliver their plug-ins. Here’s what he had to say…
“To answer your question about Acrobat X and 3D, after a detailed assessment of the 3D business, Adobe determined that the best way to support the interests of our manufacturing customers and partners is to migrate the ongoing development, delivery and support of the 3D translator technologies to a company with focus, expertise, and well-developed sales channels within the PLM market. Enter Tech Soft 3D. Tech Soft 3D’s long history of supporting and selling 3D translator technology and other OEM component technology and their familiarity with the Adobe PDF libraries make them exceptionally well qualified to support our current and future customers. But I want to emphasize that Acrobat X and Reader X still support 3D viewing/interacting with 3D data in PRC and U3D formats.”
About your question regarding how the capabilities have changed between Tech Soft 3D’s plug-in and what was available out-of-the-box in Acrobat 9 Pro Extended, I’ll provide you with comparison information as soon as it’s available, but the goal is to provide comparable functionality while also providing support for translation of the most current versions of supported file formats.
What’s kinda funny, is that Deelip asked him the same thing…
“Adobe will continue to provide core support on Acrobat 9 Pro Extended until 6/26/2013. Other key software components of Acrobat Pro Extended, including Adobe Presenter and video transcoding are now included in Adobe Acrobat X Suite. The reason being is that after a detailed assessment of the 3D business, Adobe determined that the best way to support the interests of our manufacturing customers and partners is to migrate the ongoing development, delivery and support of the 3D translator technologies to a company with focus, expertise, and well-developed sales channels within the PLM market. Enter Tech Soft 3D.”
Copy and… paste. Can’t say I blame him dealing with the same questions all day. At least I got a little more boiler plate than Deelip did though. In your face Deelip.
Using Acrobat X Reader
The interface updates are great, but there’s one thing I cant get around. The are a quite afew security updates that make reading documents a little annoying, but the worst is what you’ll see below. When opening a folder from a read-only directory, you’ll get an “Access Denied” message. I’m not sure why this is happening, there was nothing I could find in the beta forums, but it’s not exactly a calming message if you work in a company using read-only network drives to archive .PDF’s.
As I get into Acrobat X more and get my hands on any Tech soft programs, I’ll get some posts out. For now, if you’ve got 3D PDF’s you’ll still be able to view them in Acrobat X reader and Extended. As far as creating 3D PDF’s from SolidWorks, that functionality is still available since the technology to do that isn’t dependent on a full version of Acrobat being installed. What I’m wondering is if Acrobat dropping their direct involvement in 3D is going to affect you. I’m guessing it’s not.
