Which Adobe Acrobat Software is right for you

Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader are available in five different flavors. This short guide will help you decide which Acrobat incarnation is best suitable for your job.

1. Adobe Reader Basic version - Plain vanilla version that lets you open, view or print any PDF document. Free download available

2. Adobe Reader Full version - Allows searching in PDF Files, play back embedded media files and supports Adobe Digital Editions (eBooks in PDF format). Free download available

3. Adobe Acrobat Elements - Lets you create PDF files from any application, password-protect PDF documents, apply restrictions on printing, copying and alterations. [Not available for individual purchase - See Third-party alternatives to Acrobat]

4. Adobe Acrobat Standard - Let you convert entire websites or portions of webpages to PDF, scan paper to to searchable PDF document with inbuilt OCR engine, attach files to PDF documents, combine multiple files into a single consolidated PDF document, add watermarks, headers and footers, creates more accessible PDF files, provides commenting, markup and annotation tools, export reviewer comments to Microsoft Word or to another PDF file.

5. Adobe Acrobat Professional - This extreme PDF powerhouse lets you embed multimedia files and 3D Graphics into PDF, compare two documents side-by-side, create XML based PDF forms using Adobe Livecycle Designer, excellent prefighting features to ensure reliable print output, check a document for possible accessibility issues, build indexes of multiple document for even faster searching, preserves layers of Autodesk Autocad files and retains the properties of Microsoft Visio objects. Free 30-day trial download available for Windows.

The latest version of Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader is 7.0.3. You can request Adobe for a free 30-day trial DVD of Adobe Acrobat 7.0 and other Adobe Creative Suite 2 products. All Adobe products include Adobe Acrobat 7.0 pro require activation.