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Best Document Interchange

Adobe's Acrobat Flies High To Win

Take any document, open it on any computer and get to work. It was always an appealing idea, but the technology, and the trade-offs involved in its realization have proved daunting.
The original Adobe Acrobat demonstrated a powerful ability to convert documents of almost any format to Acrobat's .pdf format, which are viewable on DOS, Windows, Macintosh and Unix machines, regardless of the original application or its fonts.
While Acrobat's capabilities were impressive, its initial use seemed limited to small-scale distribution of documents. With the release of version 2.0 in 1994, Adobe unwrapped a multitude of new features designed help users build on-line warehouses of secure, indexed and compressed corporate documents.
With Acrobat's hypertext links, you can jump between documents, and not just inside the original, which allows unlimited cross-referencing of information. Acrobat v2.0 sported sophisticated new search capabilities, capped off with the new Acrobat Catalog, which indexes collections of Acrobat document.
Adobe also dramatically improved Acrobat's connectivity with other applications. It now supports indexing and embedding in Lotus Notes databases, and interapplication utilities such as Object Linking and Embedding (OLE), Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE) and AppleEvents. It has a new open architecture, with hundreds of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for enabling developers to build custom features into Acrobat. Adobe added security and encryption features, making it possible to limit access to sensitive documen ts in Acrobat collections.
In the future, we expect to see Acrobat become even more flexible and useful. Adobe has set the standard for making complex documents available in a simple way, crossing application and platform boundaries.

Adobe Acrobat v2.0, $195, Adobe
Systems, 1585 Charleston Rd., P.O. Box 7900, Mountain View, CA 94039-7900. (415) 961-4400;
fax (415) 961-3769.

Runners-Up
HiJaak PRO v3, Inset, 71
Commerce Dr., Brookfield, CT 06804-3405. (203) 740-2400;
fax (203) 775-5634.

Outside In for Windows, Systems Compatibility Corp., 401 N. Wabash, Suite 600, Chicago, IL 60611. (800) 333-1395;
(312) 329-0700; fax (312) 670-0820.