Adobe Acrobat

Adobe Acrobat is a family of application software and web services developed by Adobe Inc. to view, create, manipulate, print and manage Portable Document Format (PDF) files.

The family comprises Acrobat Reader (formerly Reader), Acrobat (formerly Exchange) and Acrobat.com. The basic Acrobat Reader, available for several desktop and mobile platforms, is freeware; it supports viewing, printing, scaling or resizing and annotating of PDF files. Additional, "Premium", services are available on paid subscription. The commercial proprietary Acrobat, available for Microsoft Windows, macOS, and mobile, can also create, edit, convert, digitally sign, encrypt, export and publish PDF files. Acrobat.com complements the family with a variety of enterprise content management and file hosting services.

Purpose

The main function of Adobe Acrobat is creating, viewing, and editing PDF documents. It can import popular document and image formats and save them as PDF. It is also possible to import a scanner's output, a website, or the contents of the Windows clipboard.

Because of the nature of the PDF, however, once a PDF document is created, its natural organization and flow cannot be meaningfully modified. In other words, Adobe Acrobat is able to modify the contents of paragraphs and images, but doing so does not repaginate the whole document to accommodate for a longer or shorter document. Acrobat can crop PDF pages, change their order, manipulate hyperlinks, digitally sign a PDF file, add comments, redact certain parts of the PDF file, and ensure its adherence to such standards as PDF/A.

History

Adobe Acrobat was launched in 1993 and had to compete with other products and proprietary formats that aimed to create digital documents: