Wednesday, November 29, 2006
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Somehow I missed that Adobe announced Acrobat 8 on September 18 and shipped it on November 2. Our office skipped version 7 because we're trying to save money and I couldn't justify the purchase for any of 7's new features. It has been problematic a few times because other offices who have 7 sometimes send us PDFs which use features only in 7. I knew Acrobat was due for upgrade soon based on the regularity of their previous releases (I think it was about every 18 months). I am hoping version 8 launches faster than version 6—that's my biggest gripe with Acrobat. The only other thing I really need in a new version of Acrobat is better control over specifying tab order for form fields but I believe Adobe will probably not address this in my lifetime. In Acrobat 6, you can have Acrobat automatically detect form field order in left-right-top-bottom or top-bottom-left-right order or you can manually click each field in the order that you want. None of these work well for some forms I have because the automatic methods aren't perfect and the manual method requires exactness in clicking that is impossible because my forms have dozens of fields, some of which are obscured by overlapping objects. If you misclick, your tab order is lost and you have to start over again. Oh, one more Acrobat 6 gripe: half-point line borders on cells in Microsoft Word tables which have background colors applied convert to PDF with poor integrity on screen and upon printing—the line is partially not formed at the top left corner of some cells. There is no way for me to know if any of these things are fixed unless I install the tryout, but we need to move to Acrobat 8 anyway for compatibility with others. (Or do we?) Chris has decided to get a new MacBook Pro to replace his Dell Latitude D800. Installed OS X updates for home. Got lots of Flickr work done—home page. Dinner at home with Patrick: chicken with angel hair in red sauce. Watched part 1 of Romeo and Juliet (1968) on DVD.