Adobe Acrobat 3.0

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On: 2014-04-17 15:33:35
Updated by: InkBlot
On: 2023-07-28 10:14:58
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  • Acrobat 3 CD ROM Cover 
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What is Adobe Acrobat 3.0?

Adobe Acrobat 3.0 for Macintosh 68K + PowerPC is a software program that was released in 1996. It was designed to create and view documents in the Portable Document Format (PDF) on both 68K and PowerPC-based Macintosh computers.

Acrobat 3.0 allowed users to convert documents from a variety of formats, including Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, into PDF files. It also included tools for creating bookmarks, hyperlinks, and annotations within PDF documents. Additionally, Acrobat 3.0 included a number of security features, such as password protection and digital signatures, to help protect sensitive information.

One of the key features of Acrobat 3.0 was the ability to embed fonts into PDF documents, ensuring that they would display correctly regardless of the computer or device used to view them. This helped to make PDF documents a reliable and consistent way to share information across different platforms.

Overall, Acrobat 3.0 helped establish the PDF format as a standard for sharing and distributing documents, and its compatibility with both 68K and PowerPC-based Macintosh computers made it accessible to a wide range of users.


Adobe makes no bones about pushing its Portable Document Format (PDF) as the standard for cross-platform documents on the Web and in print. With Acrobat 3.0, Adobe adds features to make using PDFs easier, and includes goodies that were previously available only separately or (God forbid!) only for Windows.

The Acrobat CD-ROM includes Acrobat Exchange 3.0 (to view and edit PDFs), Acrobat Distiller (to convert PostScript files to PDF), PDF Writer (a Chooser-level driver that “prints” directly to PDF), Acrobat Catalog (which indexes folders of PDFs and their contents), and the PDF viewer (also downloadable free from Adobe’s Web site). You also get a Netscape Navigator plug-in for viewing Web-based PDFs within Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer, and clip art, sounds, and fonts. Also included are three Acrobat plug-ins: Acrobat Scan, Import Image, and Capture, respectively, for scanning in documents, converting bitmap images to PDF, and performing optical character recognition on scanned images to convert them to searchable PDFs.

One crucial change in Exchange 3.0: You can now “touch up” a PDF. A typo in your PDF? Fix it without regenerating the entire document. Exchange also now has basic type controls (font, size, kerning, tracking) , although you can edit only one line of text at a time. You can also make scroll unbroken from page to page without jumps.

Despite Acrobat’s Web focus, one enhancement in Distiller aims at print production. Distiller can now embed PostScript printing information within a PDF. It can capture color-separation information and, with a new Adobe plug-in, output separations as well. Adobe claims that PDF will replace QuarkXPress or Adobe’s PostScript or PageMaker files as the standard method for getting jobs to a printer. Although Acrobat’s small size and low overhead make it an easy investment for prepress bureaus, existing solutions are heavily entrenched.

Exchange’s Web enhancements are due mainly to the Navigator plug-in, which lets you view the document in your browser window (complete with Acrobat’s control buttons) . Thanks to a new tag, you can even position and scale PDFs within a Web page just as you can a GIF or JPEG image. You can save optimally for speedy Web delivery (duplicate images are saved only once, for example). This should go a long way toward addressing the main complaint about PDFs — that it takes forever to load one.

Adobe also added multimedia features to Acrobat. You can call actions upon opening or closing a document, entering or leaving a pzge, or moving the mouse over regions of a page. The actions (playing a sound or movie, showing or hiding an image or field) are limited, compared with Macromedia Director or HyperCard, but are welcome nonetheless. You can create forms in your documents that follow the standard HTML form types: radio, checkboxes, menus, and text fields. You can add icons and actions to buttons. However, you’re allowed only one form per page, and some actions, such as defining radio buttons, are surprisingly awkward (for checkboxes or radio buttons to function as a group, you must manually assign the same name to each button).

Unfortunately, Acrobat 3.0 comes with little printed documentation. The installer gives you a slew of PDFs (about 22MB for a full install), Althougli it’s handy to have so much information a mouse click away, the cross-document link makes navigation confusing. Online help does show off one new Acrobat feature: You can now follow links between PDFs within a single window; with Acrobat 2.1, you’d get a new window for each document.

With Acrobat and a basic knowledge of HTML, you can create pages with links, sounds, movies, simple interactivity, and forms. However, with Navigator you have to wait for the Acrobat plug-in to load, whereas HTML pages can be zippy. Also, HTML pages can be dynamic and can contain animated GIFs, embedded JavaScript and Java applets, and more. PDF is still a static format. Acrobat is a terrific way to “repurpose” documents you’ve already designed for paper, but if you want to create sizzling Web pages, you’ll probably want to use PDFs as an enhancement to pages created the old-fashioned way.

Taub, Eric. (March 1997). Adobe Acrobat 3.0. MacAddict. (pgs. 68-69).


Download Adobe Acrobat 3.0 for Mac

(75.23 MiB / 78.89 MB)
System 7.0 - 7.6 - Mac OS 9 / compressed w/ Stuffit
579 / 2014-04-17 / 87009ec02b5dbcc22e8e139163c36671356c1c8f / /
(263.96 MiB / 276.78 MB)
/ Zipped
97 / 2015-08-13 / a4495af471e85b2b2742ed3a33e329e671cd5ff2 / /


Architecture


68K + PPC (FAT)



System Requirements

From Mac OS 7.0





Compatibility notes

Minimum Requirements

  • MC68020 processor
  • Acrobat Exchange
    • 4 MB RAM available (6 MB for PowerPC)
  • Acrobat Capture plug-in
    • 16 MB RAM available (PowerPC only)
  • Distiller
    • 6 MB RAM available (8 MB for PowerPC)
  • Acrobat Catalog
    • 6 MB RAM available (8 MB for PowerPC)
  • Acrobat Reader
    • 3.5 MB RAM available (5 MB for PowerPC)
  • CD-ROM drive
  • System 7.0


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