A major interface change in Acrobat 7 Professional has been to split off its forms-creation tools into the stand-alone application, Adobe LiveCycle Designer, also called Form Designer or simply Designer. It's available as a stand-alone program for $349, but it comes bundled with Acrobat 7 Pro.
Using Designer, you can create either static or dynamic forms. Static forms have a fixed layout, while dynamic forms can change layout according to the data put into them (picture buying a car online, with the options available on the form changing according to the model you select). In either case, data collected can be passed back directly or by e-mail in XML, XDP or TXT format (or in bar-code form, for forms electronically filled out and then printed) directly into a spreadsheet or database using either Acrobat Pro or Standard.
Designer is surprisingly easy to use, although it doesn't have the slick feel of an Adobe program, and it has a generally awkward quality of a version 1.0 rather than a 7.0.
Page-layout tools, for example, are rudimentary (rulers, ruler guides, basic alignment controls and a snap-to grid), as if forms are somehow second-class design citizens. The emphasis in designing this program has been on the function of the forms, and in this it's very successful.
Surprisingly, LiveCycle Designer exists only for Windows. Adobe declined to comment on when or whether there would be a Macintosh version.
Prepress Improvements
The PDF format spawned an industry based on building prepress workflows around it. The demands of that workflow, and the automation that makes them tick, are now pressing back on Acrobat itself. Acrobat 7 Pro addresses some of the missing links.
First of all, in a welcome interface advance, Acrobat 7 Pro pulls many of its prepress controls together under a new Tools menu entry: Print Production. Here you'll find file-massaging tools including those for trapping, preflighting, managing printer marks and transparency flattening, and so on. This tool kit has some notable additions.
Author Donna Baker sees Acrobat 7 as a major step forward. Click here to read more.
Whereas images based on inappropriate color spaces could be flagged as problems in previous versions, Acrobat 7 Pro can now do something about them, converting among any color spaces defined by an ICC profile.
Conversions are page-based (that is, you can't just change the color space of a single page element), and they can be applied to a single page, a range of pages or an entire document. You can preview Acrobat-created color separations on screen.
Also new are JDF (Job Description Format) file manager dialogs, where you can edit the specifics of the tickets you create or amend those that have already been appended to a PDF file. Printer's marks can be made a permanent part of a PDF file, instead of a temporary feature added only during output. This should help with problem-free archiving of PDFs for future reuse (as in a second printing of a book).
A small but overdue change is the ability to define the thickness of hairline rules, which often disappear during high-resolution output because their weight has been defined in pixels. When added to an automated preflighting routine, this will save publishers much grief.
Semi-Pro Improvements
Many of the enhancements to Acrobat 7 are common to both Standard and Pro editions, and most address increased office efficiencies. These include allowing attachments to PDF files, single-click PDF creation from within more applications (mostly Microsoft applications), the ability to append encrypted PDFs to e-mail messages, autosave (finally!) and so on. You also can have two windows open on the same document—an ability all programs should have.
Acrobat's Search tool also has been upgraded, to the great benefit of print production and IT professionals who can now search more deeply into PDF files, including—perhaps most significantly—their metadata, as well as their attachments, document structure tags, object data (object-level metadata), embedded comments and attachments.
For workgroups, Acrobat's already-useful collaborative tools have been made more manageable through the addition of Tracker, an interface for following and coordinating the progress of PDF files routed through a group for comment and editing.
It's a sort of managing-editor control panel that for many will raise such collaborations from the level of the possible to the practical. In an important move, Acrobat 7 now can create PDF files for review by users of the free Adobe Reader program (in version 6, you needed at least Acrobat Standard) by embedding in the file editing and commenting tools that Reader lacks.
Conclusion
It's the cumulative weight of all of the improvements and additions in Acrobat 7 Pro that recommend it. If you're a Macintosh user, though, this argument is not as compelling, because of the lack of a Mac version of LiveCycle Designer for forms.
A program called "Designer" from Adobe that has no Mac version? It seems unreal. Not to mention a bit of a ripoff, because the Mac version costs the same as the Windows version. Nevertheless, the $159 upgrade price is a reasonable price to pay for professional tools of this caliber, regardless of the computer you use.
Graphics Tools 
