Home > News

Adobe Updates Acrobat and Adobe Scan, Modernizing the PDF

By Laura Tucker
Adobe Updates Acrobat and Adobe Scan, Modernizing the PDF Featured Image

The PDF has stayed much the same for twenty-five years save for a few interactive aspects, but Adobe is now ready to give what could be a tired format a lift, as it updated the subscription-based Adobe Acrobat DC, as well as the free apps, Adobe Acrobat Reader and Adobe Scan, to handle PDFs better. This could lead to more possibilities with the popular document format.

A Quarter Century of PDFs

Adobe created the PDF (portable document format) in 1993 as a way to share documents without a need for both sender and recipient to have the same software, fonts, or image software.

It’s received some changes in the past quarter century in that it’s no longer just flat text and images; now it can include interactive content such as annotations, video, and form fields. It also includes the possibility of recipients signing it digitally, making it ideal for contracts and tax forms.

There is a variety of software and apps that can read PDFs, notably a collection that were created by Adobe themselves.

news-adobe-pdf-document

Adobe’s Changes

This week Adobe revised their Adobe Acrobat DC, Adobe Acrobat Reader, and Adobe Scan, which will allow for more changes to the PDF format with expanded tools and most importantly artificial intelligence.

Adobe listened to users and instituted these changes. Filling out forms, signing documents, and reviewing PDFs can now all be done within the free Adobe Acrobat Reader. There’s no reason to leave the app.

Adobe Sign has now been included directly in the reader. Those wanting to edit PDFs on a tablet can opt for the paid option of Acrobat Reader.

Acrobat DC, the subscription-based software for the DocumentCloud, will now sync across all your devices.

You can also now get team feedback and edit PDFs via all members of the team. Users had suggested that reviewing and making changes as a team was tedious, so Adobe added new share and review tools.

news-adobe-pdf-logo

Users will be able to add comments to a specific spot and annotate it and can also respond and give feedback in the tabs. Whoever initiates the team-editing process needs to have a subscription, but after that non-subscription holders can make comments via their web browser.

Adobe Scan now allows multiple business cards to be scanned in at once and then imported as separate contacts. Previously the software was updated to allow for business cards to be added in individually.

Furthermore

No matter who you are, you’ve undoubtedly encountered PDFs on numerous occasions. As much as they can be a boon and make the sharing of documents easier, then can also be frustrating, as they just never seem to work the way you want them to.

Hopefully these changes will improve the process so that it’s only a boon and not so frustrating. That being said, it may be that there are so many other ways to digitally share documents now that perhaps the PDF format is still just too outdated and no longer needed.

What’s your experience with PDFs? Has the team aspect often frustrated you? Have you wished that it would be modernized? Is Adobe just behind the times at this point? Add your thoughts and concerns about Adobe and the PDF format in the comments section below.

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Laura Tucker Avatar
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

Read next

When the SS Great Eastern laid the first working transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866, a message that had taken ten days by steamship suddenly crossed the ocean in minutes, and the financial markets of London and New York were forced, within a single trading week, to invent the modern concept of synchronised global price.
From below of blue starry sky over radio telescope and trees with leaves
The Big Ear telescope was scanning at 1420.4056 megahertz on the night of 15 August 1977, the exact frequency at which hydrogen atoms vibrate across the universe, because Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison had argued years earlier that any species trying to be found would broadcast on that channel — and then, for 72 seconds, something did.
In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way.
A contemplative scene with two scientists in a vintage laboratory setting.
When Harvard astronomer Cecilia Payne submitted her 1925 doctoral thesis arguing that the Sun was made almost entirely of hydrogen, the field’s senior figure Henry Norris Russell talked her into adding a line calling the result ‘almost certainly not real,’ and then published the same conclusion himself four years later to widespread acclaim.
When seismic waves from the Chicxulub impact reached what is now North Dakota roughly ten minutes after the asteroid struck, they appear to have triggered a ten-metre standing wave in an inland river that flung fish onto the bank and buried them under glass beads still falling from the sky.