Adobe Acrobat 6.0 Standard

I didn't waste any additional time seeing how slow it was at its own tasks. I'll take everyone's word for it.

Less than one day on the machine. I've gone back to 5.0.

My next favorite part of 6.0 has to do with the time it takes from clicking a PDF on a fast server to the display time. The load time on Adobe can only be compared to the time it takes to get the last passengers on a TWA flight to put their bagage up - pitifuly slow and you wonder what's wrong with it.

I can open Word, all 26 megs of its little memory hogging self, 3 times in the time it take acrobat to open on a cranky day. I have not figured out what makes Acrobat so inconsistant, it's insane.

In conclusion, my last peeve with this software is that many programs I deal with (cough Final Draft) when you are attempting to print a run, end up as 2 seperate PDF jobs that you have to go in and combine later. While this may not be Adobe's issue, it sure would be nice to be able to wait to finish the file until you're ready.

The first thing you notice is that the program is incredibly slow to start. This program should start as fast or faster than a word processor (i.e., Microsft Word), since it is used constantly mainly to read files.

Once you get over the interminable wait and have the program on your screen you immediately notice the deficiencies in the software. Acrobat 6.0 is missing many critical feature of Acrobat 5.0, including the catalog (index) and touch-up of objects (images). In addition (and amazingly), the pop-up search box is gone! To search inside a PDF requires launching an annoying pane that reduces the size of the window in which the PDF is displayed. Overall, I can't see that the product provides any enhanced usability. Even the "Read Out Loud" function is unusable because the speech is garbled. More irritations: The icons are too large, taking up excessive screen real estate. The column select function is missing; this was handy to properly select text in multi-column documents. (NOTE ADDED APRIL 1, 2004: After using the product for a while, I'm not sure that column select is really necessary in 6.0. Text selection may be more intelligent in this version of the program.)

NOTE ADDED APRIL 1, 2004: After using this product for several months, I have learned to like the was the search feature operates. Yes, invoking search does cause a large pane to pop-up on the right side of your screen, making it hard to read your document which is resized smaller. However, the results list provided by search gives you the context in which the search term is located and it is easy to jump to the desired point in your document. There are times that this type of search is much more useful than the jump through the document (Microsoft Word-like) search in Acrobat 5.0. However, the lack of the catalog (index) feature in Acrobat 6.0 is a major, major disadvantage. Adobe -- if you are listening -- the next version of Acrobat should have all three search capabilities: (1) catalog as in 5.0, (2) jump through the document search as in 5.0, and (3) results list search as in 6.0. For any given search situation, one of these search approaches will be superior. You really need all three. One final point: Integration of Acrobat 6.0 with Internet Explorer may be slightly better than for 5.0. Nevertheless, there are still times when running Acrobat 6.0 inside IE will hang your computer.