Acrobat version 1.0. (Adobe Systems Inc.'s Acrobat Exchange for Macintosh and Windows and Acrobat Distiller for Macintosh and Windows) (Software Review) (two of five evaluations of portable document software packages in 'Portable Documents') (Evaluation)

Adobe Systems Inc. sells its portable document software, Acrobat, Version 1.0, as two related document creation products -- Acrobat Exchange and Acrobat Distiller -- both of which are available for Windows and Macintosh. Exchange offers tools for creating, manipulating, and viewing a document. The more expensive Distiller, strictly a creation program, provides better fidelity for PostScript documents and offers finer compression controls.

Because Acrobat does not let you embed a viewer within a document, portable-document recipients must install either Exchange or Acrobat Reader.

Acrobat offers the most sophisticated navigation tools of any portable-document program, clearly aiming its features at corporations seeking to publish databases and manuals on-line. Acrobat is the first product to offer documents that are portable across multiple platforms. We look at Exchange and Distiller on both Mac and Windows platforms here.

PERFORMANCE: FIDELITY OF FONTS

Adobe seems to constantly seek new ways to exploit its PostScript technology, and Acrobat is no exception. To display and print fonts, Acrobat comes with Adobe Type Manager 3.6 (also known as Super ATM) on the Mac and ATM 2.6 on Windows, both of which use Multiple Master fonts (whose shapes are malleable) to simulate fonts that a document uses but which aren't installed on the reader's system. This approach results in high-quality printed output, because …