Adobe Acrobat

Adobe Acrobat was the first software to support Adobe Systems' Portable Document Format. It is mostly described in those entries. The Acrobat Reader program is available as a no-charge download from Adobe's web site, and allows the viewing and printing of PDF documents. The full Acrobat program allows some minimal editing and adding of features to PDF files, and comes with two other modules: the PDFwriter printer driver to create PDF files, and the Distiller program to turn PostScript files or print streams into PDF files.

In the early 1990s, the Acrobat product had several competitors such as Common Ground from No Hands Software. These each used their own document formats.

By the late 90s PDF had become the de facto standard, and the others had become largely historical footnotes. The chief advantage is one can see more than one page in a single document (what one cannot do in HTML files). The downside is that if a multipage document is available on the web as PDF file, one can not link directly to a particular page.

Today, there are a host of third-party programs that create or manipulate PDF, such as Enfocus Pitstop.

Troubleshooting

• Browser freezing - On some Windows systems, the Acrobat Reader plugin is causing the browser to freeze when opening a PDF document, or when navigating away from a page after viewing a PDF document. This can happen with both Internet Explorer and Mozilla-based browsers. This problem has been experimented with version 5 and 6 of Adobe Acrobat. A solution to this problem is to disable the Acrobat plug-in. This can be done by searching for all the files named nppdf32.dll and renaming them in nppdf32.dll.sav, so they are not recognized as plugins by any browser.