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:

• AnyView from Binar Graphics
• Common Ground from No Hands Software
• Envoy from WordPerfect Corporation
• Folio from NextPage
• Microsoft Reader from Microsoft
• Replica from Farallon Computing
• 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