Adobe Systems recently announced Adobe Acrobat 9, which incorporates Flash technology into the widely used PDF documents.

Because of Flash Integration, Acrobat users can now include videos and also application files compatible with flash player in PDF documents. Document recipients can utilize Adobe Acrobat Reader to view and use this content. Adobe says that Acrobat 9 turns static documents into dynamic communications. Users can also insert H.264 or FLV video for direct playback in both Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat. A variety of video formats may also be converted to FLV for playback in PDF.

Acrobat 9 also features a concept known as PDF Portfolios, that enables the unification of content in a single document, which will let users to put multiple media file types such as videos, documents and 3D objects in a compressed .pdf file format.

Live collaboration within PDF documents is also supported as well, through a group of services collectively called Acrobat.com and available in the form of a public beta release. It will have many applications. Utilizing this, a businessman may use Acrobat 9 and send contracts to his client, for example. Groups of people could work on a document in real- time via Acrobat.com. Integration of Acrobat 9 with acrobat.com also enables storage & sharing of PDF files. Adobe mentioned that it was all about extending Acrobat so that people could work better with documents. Featured at Acrobat.com are Adobe Buzzword, a web-based word processor, and ConnectNow, which can be used for online web-conferencing and desktop-sharing.

Other features include the ability to create PDF maps through import of geospatial files which retain metadata and coordinates and also the ability to Personalize a PDF Portfolio with customizable templates for branding & navigation. Another useful feature is that it is possible to compare and then highlight the differences between 2 different versions of a PDF file/document. PDF files can also be created using document scanning to PDF and automatically recognize text with optical character recognition (OCR).

Using AutoCAD, convert cad drawings to PDF with Acrobat PDFMaker button, preserving the document layers in AutoCAD. 2D and 3D CAD designs can also be converted to PDF for project collaboration without expensive CAD or viewer software.

Acrobat 9, comes in Standard, Mac OS X, Pro and Pro Extended editions, will be available in July. The Standard Edition contains basic forms capabilities only. The Pro version has many extra’s like a powerful forms designer. Acrobat 9 Extended edition includes Adobe LiveCycle Designer ES and Adobe Presenter. It provides capabilities like video conversion and 3D functionality. Moreover, PowerPoint documents may be converted into Flash & also be wrapped in a PDF.