About Adobe Acrobat
Adobe Acrobat was the first software to support Adobe Systems'
Portable Document Format. It is mostly described in those entries.
The Acrobat Reader program (now just called Adobe Reader)
is available as a no-charge download from Adobe's web site, and
allows the viewing and printing of PDF files. Commercial
Acrobat programs (of which there are several) allows some minimal
editing and adding of features to PDF documents, and come with
other modules including a printer driver to create PDF files from
Macintosh or Microsoft Windows applications.
Since the early 1990s, the Acrobat product had several
competitors who each used their own document formats, such as:
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AnyView from Binar Graphics
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Common Ground from No Hands Software
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Envoy from WordPerfect Corporation
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Folio from NextPage
-
Microsoft Reader from Microsoft
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Replica from Farallon Computing
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WorldView from Interleaf
By the late 1990s PDF had become the de facto
standard, and the others had become largely historical footnotes. This in turn has led
to many more competitors for Adobe Acrobat, both free and commercial.
Today, there are a host of third-party programs that create or manipulate
PDF, such as Ghostscript. Adobe also
allow Acrobat plug-ins to be developed, which can add extra
functions within the Acrobat program; such as Enfocus
Pitstop.
Product names
Adobe have changed the names of the products in the
Acrobat family regularly, also splitting products up, joining them
together, or discontinuing members. This causes much confusion, not only about what
product to obtain, but even about what product people have.
As of 2004, the current main members of the Adobe
Acrobat family are:
-
Adobe Reader 7 (previously Adobe Acrobat Reader);
no-charge software to read or print PDF files.
-
Adobe Acrobat Standard 7 and Adobe Acrobat Professional 7
; commercial (paid for) software to create PDFs and
to manipulate them in various ways. Between version 3 and 5 these were
one product simply called Adobe Acrobat.
-
A growing collection of server and specialist products.
Adobe have never created a product called either Adobe Writer or Acrobat Writer,
although these names seem a natural opposite to the Reader product. Purists and
pedants dislike these made-up names. To add more confusion, Acrobat used to include
a printer driver called PDFWriter.
Link:
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/reader_archive.html#Win
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