Adobe Acrobat Pro X review

Paperless workflows are more popular than ever, but does Adobe’s PDF production software hold the keys to a digital future?

It also includes an Action Wizard section, new to this version, which walks users through seven common tasks such as Publish Sensitive Documents and Prepare for Review. Some of these are rudimentary Archive Paper Documents comprises a single step: Add Document Description. The OCR wizard is more involved but we didn't warm to it. The fact that the language defaulted to English (US) for every page we scanned except for one that it decided was in Korean is enough to make us look to a dedicated OCR package such as Nuance OmniPage. Wizards can also be edited or created from scratch, which could prove useful for making sure complex workflows are followed to the letter.

Acrobat Pro X can also create Portfolios collections of PDFs, or any other file type for that matter, wrapped up in a smart animated front end. The most obvious use is for distributing collections of documents where making a good impression is important press packs, for instance. However, while Portfolios were introduced in Acrobat Pro 9 in 2008, the idea doesn't seem to have caught on; we've yet to see a single instance of it in the wild. The five new templates for the front end certainly look smart but the glossy animated interfaces can be a little tedious when you just want to get to the information.

Various file types included in a Portfolio can be previewed directly in Adobe Reader rather than having to be extracted first, but while audio and video clips were handled well, previews of Word and Excel files were too small to be legible. We also spotted a bug whereby changing the name of a folder updated in one place but not another, which runs the risk of placeholder names wandering through to the final cut.