Acrobat 9 and Life Sciences

Greetings blog readers. Recently, I had a chance to get a (slightly) early look at Adobe Acrobat 9.0. Here are my thoughts on some of the significant differences for Life Sciences Professionals:

• Inclusion of Acrobat Connect: Although perhaps not significant for large organizations which already have access to WebEx, NetMeeting, etc. for smaller organizations some lightweight teleconferencing
  
• Basic Form Tools in Standard: Creating forms in Adobe Acrobat 9 has gotten dramatically easier thanks to a really intuitive forms wizard. As a result, this has become the premium form feature in Acrobat Pro 9, and Acrobat Standard 9 regains the standard Forms tools which have been absent from the entry-level version of Acrobat since the 5.0. This is significant since some EDC systems and Publishing systems make use of the Forms tool. The new wizard is very nice, particularly for converting paper forms to PDF forms.
  
• Split Capability: Previously you couldn't easily split PDFs from one PDF into multiple documents, but instead had to delete page ranges manually and save multiple times. Acrobat 9 introduces a split capability, but I am not sure how it compares to more established third party options such as ISIToolBox.
• OCR Improvements: The out of the box OCR engine continues to improve in Acrobat, and it has made steady and significant imrovements since Acrobat 6. Language support beyond English is also getting better. Another nice compliment is the fact that ISIToolBox 6.0 adds the ability to spellcheck OCR results. This is particularly nice in Europe (see NeeS eGuidance, Annex 1, page 12) where the agencies will ask for hidden text, unlike the FDA who generally OCRs on demmand.
• Flash Support: A cool feature is the ability to embed Flash directly into PDF files. While it is unclear how this could be used for submisisons specifically, this could provide an easy way to embed multimedia marketing material into a PDF file for eCTD submissions.
• PDF Portfolios: Another feature that might not be readily usable for submissions but could very well be used internally for efficient content distribution are PDF packages, which bundle related content together (like a ZIP file). The upside is that you don't need any additional software or knowhow to use the ZIP file -- you open it directly in Acrobat. For reviews of groups of documents (think CMC, Study Reports, etc) this could become very useful.

There are certainly a number of other features out there. Get more information directly from the Adobe website. One other item which is not a new feature per se, but something I think has been overlooked for some time are these instructions on how to get Acrobat 8 (and I assume 9) working with SAFE signatures.