Adobe released planned updates for Acrobat DC, Acrobat 2017 and Acrobat 2015. As usual there are three separate installers:
- Acrobat 20.009.20063 for subscribers of the Document Cloud (Continuous Track)
- Acrobat 17.011.30171 for users with a perpetual license of Acrobat 2017 (Classic Track)
- Acrobat 15.006.30523 for users with a perpetual license of Acrobat 2015 (Classic Track)
The updates can also be installed using the Acrobat menu Help > Check for Updates….
For Acrobat 2017 and Acrobat 2015 there are only a few bug fixes. However, for Acrobat DC there are a number of new features and improvements:
.
- Protected mode (sandbox) support in Acrobat
- Streamlined Fill & Sign experience
- New Sign menu
- Simplified and guided redact experience
- Cut, copy, and paste thumbnails in Organize Pages tool and page thumbnails
- Open Comments pane by default for PDF with comments
- Modernized print dialog box
- Cloud-powered search suggestions
- PDFMaker add-in for Microsoft Excel on Mac
- Google Chrome extension for Acrobat on Mac
- New Fill & Sign in Acrobat option in Google Chrome
- Flash content disable in 3D files
- Full Check feature in Accessibility renamed to Accessibility Check
- Authorization scope changes for Gmail in Acrobat
- Performance improvement in PDF rendering
- Contextual help content from within the application
The new features are presented visually in a short video:
In my opinion the most innovative new feature is the improvement of the search function. The new cloud-powered search option in Acrobat shows search suggestions related to your search keywords. When you search for a word, it not only provides matches for the searched word but also related words and synonyms found in the document. Additionally, it considers what you meant even when there is a typo or misspelling. To enable or disable cloud-powered search, click the settings icon (
), and then choose Cloud-Powered Search.
Adobe is testing the new cloud-powered search suggestions in Acrobat DC. Therefore, the new search feature may not be available to all Acrobat DC users. This is also true for other new features (e.g. Protected mode, Fill & Sign, Sign menu).
For users in print production, some bug fixes of the preflight function are of particular interest:
- Preflight PDF/X-4 verification erroneously flags error for JPEG2000-compressed image.
- Error appear while creating output intents.
- Preflight output intent for customisation of “Japan Color 2011 Coated.icc” profile error.
- Unable to modify preflight settings from an imported action.
Among them is a bug I reported to Adobe and Callas (developer of the preflight module in Acrobat) exactly two months ago. In the latest Acrobat versions (19.021.20058 and 20.006.20034), there was an unjustified error message when checking PDF/X-4 conformity for PDFs containing JPEG2000 images. Of course this also affected the preflight profiles of PDFX-ready and the Ghent Workgroup.
Since PDFX-ready currently advises against using JPEG2000 for print production because it has several disadvantages, most users were not directly affected by this false error message.
Nevertheless, it is encouraging that this error has been corrected in (for Adobe) a very short time!
