[UPDATE (October 18th) — Right on time, Adobe Acrobat X (Acrobat 10) is out! Learn more about the new features, the differences from previous versions, or download a free trial.]
Happy second birthday Acrobat 9!
Yes, it’s true – two years ago today Adobe officially released Acrobat 9:
Adobe Acrobat 9 Software Now Available
New Version Receives Accolades for PDF Portfolios, Real-time Capabilities and Support for Adobe Flash Technology
SAN JOSE, Calif. — June 25, 2008 — Adobe Systems today announced the immediate availability of Adobe® Acrobat® 9 software, a significant upgrade that transforms the process of creating and sharing electronic documents… [continues]
So considering Adobe usually runs on two-year product release schedules, give or take, what does this imply for when Acrobat 10 will be coming out?
In early May, we reported here that “Acrobat 10 is going to launch in the second half of this year” – but now we have more precise information…
This week Adobe’s CEO gave a presentation and Q&A to financial analysts in which he talked about CS5, Acrobat, and business in general. He said some great things, and here are the highlights for when Acrobat 10 will be available and its new features:
Shantanu Narayen – President and CEO, Adobe Systems:
In our Acrobat business, the strength we experienced in the fourth and first quarters continued through the second quarter. Enterprise licensing was particularly strong, demonstrating the Acrobat and PDF value proposition continues to resonate with large customers. We are on track to deliver a new version of Acrobat late in our fourth quarter that will focus on enabling knowledge workers and enterprises to collaborate across critical document workflows. [Ed. note – Adobe’s fiscal fourth quarter ends in late November 2010.]
Michael Olson – Piper Jaffray:
Just one quick question, with Acrobat 10 coming in Q4, people may wonder what kind of additions can you make to a product like Acrobat – and I realize you may not want to give away specific new features, but can you just talk about in general what kind of things you can do with products like Acrobat to improve the new version?
Shantanu Narayen:
Mike, what we are seeing is a lot of Acrobat usage right now within enterprises to do what we call critical document workflows. The integration of Acrobat and acrobat.com is ripe area of innovation and opportunity for us to continue to deliver value to customers. Delivery of PDF files across mobile devices is becoming an increasing use case for us. So, multiple innovations are on the drawing board and we are excited about the new version that as we said will come out later this year.
So there you have it – from what the CEO says, it looks like Acrobat 10 (or Acrobat X) will be shipping sometime between mid-October to late-November this year. If you’d like to give feedback for what you’d like to see in the new version, please feel free to share your thoughts at the Acrobat Feature Request forum. Or, you can enter a comment below…
In the meantime, join the free online Acrobat Webinar Series where Adobe experts share tips, tricks, and insights into Acrobat, plus answer questions – the most recent session is this afternoon at 1pm Eastern time, and available on-demand thereafter.
[UPDATE (October 7th) – Win a free upgrade to Adobe Acrobat 10 Pro!]
thank’s…
Thank you for posting this exchange. I have been waiting for version 10 for what seems like forever. Currently have version 8 on a 64 bit Win7 system and it is sluggish bloatware. I am probably kidding myself to think that 10 will be lean and spry. Ah, but here’s hoping.
Hi Dorothy, thanks for your comment. There is hope, particularly because version 9 (which you haven’t upgraded to) is much better than version 8 in performance… Acrobat 8 seemed to be the pinnacle of the “kitchen sink” effect whereby Adobe threw everything in there without worrying too much about performance, and usability suffered as a result.
But for Acrobat 9 they got religion and there was substantial rearchitecting, with performance up to twice as fast (for example start-up), which really makes a difference… So there’s good reason to anticipate that Acrobat 10 will be even spryer – like you said, here’s hoping.
thanks
I had a problem with an Acrobat Pro 9 Trial and when someone from Tech had contacted me back by phone, I voiced some gripes about the Pro 9 and he replied that it may be resolved with version 10 coming out next month. This was about a week, week and a half ago……
And it figures that my superiors just gave me the green light to upgrade from Pro 7, and got me Pro 9.
If I knew for sure when it was coming out I may have held out, Oh Well…
Hi Dave, thank you for your comment and story. That’s interesting the support rep thought the next version of Acrobat could be coming out this month… It’s possible he could be right, although presumably the Adobe CEO’s guidance would be a bit more reliable. We may get another clue when Adobe does its next investor presentation next Wednesday. Thanks again for sharing your experience and good luck with the product.
Hi guys, tried loading this blog through Google RSS reader and got a strange error message, any ideas what could be the issue?
Hi Hameed, thank you for your question. Do you mean the Google Reader? It seems to work fine for reading our blog’s RSS feed… Could you be more descriptive about what you used, what RSS feed address, and what error message you got? Thanks very much!
Nevermind, works now!
Great Hameed – thanks for the update, glad to hear it.
Hi,
I have Pro8 right now and I’m trying to hold out till Q4 to get Pro10. Would I be able to buy the upgrade version for Pro10 or would I have to pony up the entire amount as if I’ve never bought Pro8? Just trying to weigh whether I should wait for Pro10 or just buy Pro9 Upgrade version. Thanks.
Hello Kitty, welcome and thank you for your excellent question. We can’t know for certain what Adobe’s upgrade policy will be for any upcoming version, as that is made known at the time of product announcement…
But, there is good reason to believe you’ll be fine to move from Adobe Acrobat 8 Pro to Acrobat 10 Pro for the reduced upgrade price. If you look at the current upgrade policy for Acrobat 9 Pro, you’ll find that Adobe allows upgrades from Acrobat 6.x, 7.x, or 8.x Professional all for $159. (The full normal price is $449.)
In our experience, Adobe usually keeps these things pretty consistent from release to release… So logic would suggest that for Acrobat 10 Professional, versions 7, 8, and 9 could receive the discounted price for the new upgrade cycle. Hope this helps.
We use a custom table of contents at work (generated in Microsoft Word) that links users to certain pages within the document. It works well for us because the assemblers can simply look on the table for the particular assembly step they are performing, click and travel immediately to that step. I recently converted to Word 2007 and was troubled to discover that Acrobat 9 does not support cross-reference and table of contents links in Word 2007. Will Acrobat 10 support this or do we need to find some other software? We are being forced to convert to Office 2007 later this year and have thousands of documents that will have “dead” table of contents.
Greetings Diana, we can’t say for sure yet what’s going to be Acrobat 10, but would suggest you communicate the same thing directly to Adobe via an official Product Feature Request submission, and/or get yourself signed up for the Adobe Acrobat 10 Public Prerelease Program to see what’s coming down the pike to give feedback on it. Hope this helps.
I am a mac user… I would like it if Acrobat 10 was as fast as Preview, so that I could use it as my default PDF viewing program. Also, files with highlighted text get messed up with the highlights covering the text if I try to flatten the PDF as a part of my ‘optimize PDF’ workflow — can this be corrected?
I had Adobe Acrobat 8 Pro and it kept crashing. I was upgraded to 9 Pro and there is one feature that I use consistently that did not work. It was the snapshot tool. Has this been corrected using Pro X? I am looking to upgrade to the newest Pro software.
Also, is Adobe Acrobat Pro X the same as Adobe Acrobat 10 Pro?
forgot to click the notify by email button for responses
Welcome V, thanks for your question. Definitely the Snapshot Tool is in Acrobat X, although Adobe moved it a bit in the interface. We haven’t heard of any issues with the command, but if you want to be sure, just download and run the free trial of the new version and see how it goes. And yes, you can run it side-by-side with Acrobat 9 or 8.
To your second question, Acrobat X Pro is the same thing as Acrobat 10 Pro, in fact the “X” is even pronounced as “ten.”
Lastly, you may also be interested in the differences between Acrobat versions, as well as 3 hours of free tutorials for Acrobat X.
I’ve used Acrobat 9. It was difficult for 8 and 9. I work for a publishing concern. We’ve used Ctrl + Tab to switch from one Acrobat screen to another Acrobat screen on 7 and 8 version. But, Acrobat 9 used the Ctrl + F6 key on keyboard. So, it’s very difficult. If update this issue next version.
Hey there Mani, you can check for yourself whatever you’d like in the new Acrobat documentation – here is the complete list of all keyboard shortcuts for Acrobat X (10).
I purchased Adobe Acrobat X and could not find whether it is a 32 or 64 bit version. My desktop is 64 bit and my laptop is 32. Do I have to buy the version I do not have? The program does not work very well in the 32 bit system. Any help on this will be appreciated.
Hi Felix, thanks for your question. The Acrobat X Family is 64-bit compliant, but there actually is no specific or native 64-bit version of Adobe Acrobat X…
For more information, please see the Acrobat X FAQ.