The PDF format is an open standard, but Adobe invented it, and Adobe's Acrobat still does more and better things with PDF files than anything else. You will pay more for Adobe Acrobat 8 Standard than for rival products, but you get a highly polished product that's guaranteed to produce high-quality results.

Even with Acrobat 8 Standard, you don't get all the features built into Acrobat 8 Professional—including the ability to create fillable PDF forms or to remove parts of PDF documents that you need to keep secret—but you do get Microsoft Office toolbars that create PDF files directly from Office applications, along with tools in Acrobat itself that edit, merge, annotate, optimize, and otherwise improve PDF files. Finally, there's even an Optical Character Reading module that converts scanned images into PDF files.

With this eighth major version, Adobe has refined the Acrobat interface so the most widely used features are accessible from a toolbar with drop-down menus leading to options for creating, combining, exporting, securing, digitally signing, reviewing, and commenting on PDF files. The features that impress me most include the ability to build a PDF from multiple PDF files, with an option to choose only specific pages from each file; and an option to create a "security envelope" that lets you e-mail one or more files in a password- or certificate-protected package.

Acrobat's Create PDF menu includes options for creating a PDF from a Web address. Using this feature you can make a single PDF containing anything from a single page to all the content from a multipage site. The results of this "Web capture" feature are sometimes better than what you get when "printing" to PDF format directly from the Web browser, but unfortunately, they can also be worse. The Web-capture feature correctly translates form fields in the original HTML page into active form fields in the captured PDF, which is good. What's bad is that the Web-capture feature gets confused by button bars on a page, so the button bar at the top of the page at PCMag.com gets translated into a vertical column of buttons when Acrobat captures the Web page. This is all the more frustrating, given that the button bar appears correctly when you "print" the same page to PDF through the browser's print dialog.

Acrobat exports PDF files to Microsoft Word and other standard formats, but don't expect perfect results. The formatting of the output Word file inevitably differs from the formatting in the PDF file, and one annoying gotcha is that Acrobat exports PDF "Sticky Notes" to Word comments but doesn't export the PDF comments that Acrobat lets you make when you highlight text. This is especially confusing, because Acrobat's option to "Include Comments" causes Acrobat to include in an output Word file the annotations that Acrobat labels as Sticky Notes but not the annotations that it labels as Comments.

An option to scan images to searchable PDF files via OCR works well with images scanned from office documents and modern magazines and books. You probably won't care that Adobe's OCR works less well with books a century or more old; for them you'll get better results with Nuance's PDF Converter 4 Professional or from Abbyy's ABBYY PDF Transformer 2.0 Pro. I sometimes work with PDF files that contain a thousand pages, so I rely on Acrobat's ability to create an index to the current file, which it embeds within the file for lightning-fast text searches.

Despite minor problems, Adobe's Acrobat 8 still strikes me as the gold standard of PDF editing and creation, and it's the PDF product I use more often than any other. If you or your company can afford it, you won't regret buying a PDF creator from the company that created PDF.

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