Adobe Releases Acrobat Reader Beta for Pocket PC

By Planet eBook Editor
September 24, 2001

Adobe has announced the availability of a beta version of its all new Acrobat Reader for Pocket PC. Pocket PC users can download a copy immediately by heading to the download page at Adobe's site.

The release now places Acrobat Reader on virtually all popular personal computing operating systems (such as Window, Mac, Unix and Linux) and handheld devices (including PalmOS-based devices and Pocket PCs). The latest Pocket PC devices that can now use Acrobat Reader include the E-115 Cassiopeia, Cassiopeia EM-500, iPAQ H3600 and the Jornada 545 & 548

As Planet eBook reported last year after seeing Adobe's technology demonstration at Seybold San Francisco 2000, the Acrobat Reader for Pocket PC includes the functionality common to Acrobat Reader, including bookmarks, thumbnails, zooming, 'go to page,' text selection, viewing annotation and the latest (all important for eBooks) page reflow technology.

The release of Acrobat Reader for Pocket PC and the recent release Acrobat Reader for Palm users is another step forward in the company's vision it calls "Network Publishing" -- a new stage in publishing in which the creation, management and delivery of digital content becomes possible anywhere and anytime, using a multitude of different computing devices.

According to Adobe, since the May 29 release more than one million downloads of Acrobat Reader for Palm have occurred -- around ten percent of people that use handheld devices with the PalmOS installed.

Users of WindowsCE 2.0 and older devices (as with Microsoft Reader) are out of luck as Adobe does not have plans to release a version Acrobat Reader for them. Support for Forms and DRM are not included in the release, however it does allow PDFs to be password protected.

A little on reflow

The real benefit of reflow is that it means the PDF can be viewed more easily on different sized devices (with different sized screen resolutions). PDF files with reflow capability are created by embedding these structure tags within the PDF file. The logical structure of a PDF file is stored separately from its physical representation in what is known as a structure tree. This tree of elements contains pointers from the logical structure to the physical representation. More...

MORE INFO