Ahead of the company's planned July release, Adobe recently began shipping Adobe Creative Suite 3.3 and Adobe Acrobat 9. The new Creative Suite bundles are still available as Design Premium, Design Standard, Web Premium, and Master Collection, and now include Acrobat Professional 9. Creative Suite 3.3 Design Premium also now includes Fireworks CS3; previously, Adobe only included the vector and bitmap graphics editor with its Creative Suite Web Edition.
The Mac-compatible Acrobat 9 Pro offers a new PDF Portfolios feature that lets a user drag and drop documents and multimedia content into a single PDF document. Subsequently, users are able to choose from myriad layout and presentation options. Other additions to Acrobat include support for one compressed PDF file containing multiple media types.
Also, the new version allows the creation of PDF maps by importing geospatial files that retain metadata and coordinates. As expected, Adobe is making online services available on the Acrobat.com site to complement the software and enable all this collaboration.
Acrobat Pro 9 also includes new preflighting and auto correction features for print production environments. It supports RGB and CMYK conversions, spot color remapping, and overprint preview. Version 9 includes an Object Inspector for reviewing the metadata associated with any selected object, can identify a wide range of differences in document versions, and offers full support for PDF/A, PDF/X, PDF/X-4p, PDF/X-5 and PDF/E.
The software comes in three versions: Acrobat 9 Pro Extended (USD 699), Acrobat 9 Pro (USD 449), and Acrobat 9 Standard (USD 299). Pro will allow branded Portfolios, and Pro Extended adds Adobe Presenter software which converts Microsoft PowerPoint presentations into Acrobat; it's also the only version that will include non-Flash video conversion.
All versions work under Microsoft Windows, and the Pro version is also available for Apple Mac OS X. English, French, German, and Japanese language versions are available for each. The Pro version is now bundled with Adobe Creative Suite 3.3, as well. The software is available immediately from Adobe's Web site.