UPDATE for FEBRUARY 20, 2013: Patches are now available for Adobe Reader and Acrobat XI for Windows and Macintosh, X for Windows and Macintosh, and 9 for Windows, Macintosh and Linux. Please refer to the Security Advisory section of the Adobe website as well as the Adobe PSIRT blog for details.
Adobe plans to make available updates for Adobe Reader and Acrobat XI (11.0.01 and earlier) for Windows and Macintosh, X (10.1.5 and earlier) for Windows and Macintosh, 9.5.3 and earlier 9.x versions for Windows and Macintosh, and Adobe Reader 9.5.3 and earlier 9.x versions for Linux during the week of February 18, 2013. Adobe will continue to provide updates on these issues via the Security Advisory section of the Adobe website as well as the Adobe PSIRT blog. Please refer to these resources for any details.
Remember floppy disks? What about cassette tapes? These two types of technology seem almost ancient, and something you might find in an antique store. Well move over floppy disks and cassette tapes and make some room for the fax machine! A large percentage of faxes are used to send a document with multiple signatures. What if these documents could be signed and exchanged electronically by each person?
Adobe Acrobat XI has full support for signing documents. Adobe EchoSign is an easy to use online service that allows you to instantly send, eSign, track and file documents securely. Recipients can sign right in their browser on virtually any connected device without downloading a plug-in or having to create an EchoSign account. Using these two products together gives you the ability to complete the entire process of signing documents electronically, and the final signed document can be viewed reliably by anyone with the free Adobe Reader.
In the two years since FormsCentral was first introduced, we’ve gotten really great feedback from all of our customers about how easy it is to create good-looking, professional forms; not only is the WYSIWYG design mechanism intuitive and flexible, you can also match colors exactly with a HEX value and add your own images and styling elements to get the form to look just the way you want.
Today we’re taking this design freedom one step further by adding a feature that we’ve been asked for quite a lot: the ability to line up your fields side by side on a form instead of stacking them vertically. So now, instead of taking up tons of vertical real estate, you can get the same information in only a teeny bit of space. Now, not only will your forms be beautiful and functional, they’ll also be economically designed.
Back in the olden days when we all worked with paper documents and read paperback books, the matter of keeping our place in a multiple-page document was straightforward: dog-ear the page, or add a bookmark. If that bookmark falls out, though… well, you’ll be digging through that document saying to yourself “I think the last sentence I read started with the word ‘also’…”. A pain in the neck, and a waste of your time.
Nowadays, we’ve got simpler ways of keeping track of our documents and our progress within them. If you’re reading a PDF file in Adobe Acrobat, for example, you can place bookmarks the same as ever (and these ones won’t fall out); you can also use the navigation bar to jump straight to a page in the middle of the document. Our challenge now is this: what happens when you close that document and reopen it on a different device? You don’t want to have to remember where you were and have to flip to the right page, and you definitely don’t want to have to do that every time you reopen that 60-page contract full of legal-speak.
Today’s solution is Acrobat.com. If you’re using Acrobat or Reader 11.0.1 (the latest and greatest), you can now set your preferences to allow for picking up right where you left off. Read through that contract at your own pace; if, at page 43, you find you need to leave your desk for an appointment across town, upload the document to Acrobat.com with a single click. Then, from the train or the cab or the waiting room, use Adobe Reader Mobile on your tablet or smartphone to open that document from Acrobat.com – and you’ll see that the document opens to the same spot you’d left it when you uploaded it from your desktop computer. Now your page number is just one less thing to think about – with no bookmarks to keep track of.
We are pleased to announce that the Adobe Acrobat XI SDK (Software Development Kit) for Windows and Mac OS is now available as a free download from the Acrobat Developer Center
. The SDK is a set of tools and documentation that help developers automate, extend, integrate and interact with Acrobat and Adobe Reader software through JavaScript, AppleScript, plug-ins and Interapplication Communication. This overview is a great introduction to what the Acrobat SDK can do.
New Updater Mode Added to Acrobat XI for Windows
The Adobe Acrobat XI for Windows updater now has a fully-automated mode. As a reminder, “fully-automated” mode will regularly check for important updates, download them to your machine, and install them automatically. When finished, you will be alerted via a small message in the system tray that your software has been updated. This method is the recommended best practice for keeping Adobe Acrobat up-to-date and more secure given the fact that it does not require user intervention.
Handling Flash in 10.1.5
As mentioned in Three Common Adobe Reader and Acrobat Security Questions, unknown Flash will now be rendered by the system Flash Player (NPAPI version), when using Adobe Reader and Acrobat 10.1.5. Note: This has already been done for Reader and Acrobat 11. As stated before, this means that Adobe Reader/Acrobat users will no longer have to update Adobe Reader/Acrobat each time we update the Flash Player. This is particularly beneficial to customers in managed environments, because fewer updates means a lower cost of ownership, while maintaining a vigilant security posture.
And as a reminder, support for Adobe Acrobat 9.x will end on June 26, 2013.
