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here's no argument that Adobe Acrobat's PDF is one of the definitive Internet file formats. While newer technologies such as Dynamic HTML and the Extensible Markup Language will eventually help deliver better viewing of business documents, Webmasters are increasingly using Acrobat to get out the business word and brand messages. But Acrobat evolves from its niche as a high-fidelity document container with version 4.0, becoming a valuable tool for collaborative document workflow and Web development and publishing.

Acrobat began as a convenient tool for preserving fidelity between paper and digital representations of documents. The freely redistributable Player soon found a home in marketing, sales, and legal departments, and support for incremental streaming in Internet Information Server and other Web servers made the PDF format more viable on intranet and public Web sites.

With Acrobat 4.0, Adobe extends the product's reach by adding collaborative features. You can mark up files without requiring the originating application, add pop-up boxes, buttons, and text fields to emulate paper forms, apply digital signatures and passwords to allow secure review of documents, and automatically attach a PDF file to an E-mail message and send it from within Acrobat, Microsoft Word, or another Office application.

The annotation tools let you underline, strike through, and highlight words or paragraphs, draw a circle around an object and insert a sticky note, and stamp documents with clip art such as "Confidential," Authorized," "Draft," and "Final." You can also embed an Excel spreadsheet or another separate file. Double-clicking the file annotation icon launches the attached file in the application that created it.

Acrobat's SelfSign Signature technology lets users set up a digital signature profile with name, company, department, password, and other team information. You then add the profile to a PDF file, choose a phrase such as "This document is ready for review" from a drop-down list, and send the document on for review. At the next stop in the workflow process, the recipient can right-click and select "Validate Signature" from the pop-up menu to confirm that the document has not been altered. Each time a user adds a signature, Acrobat creates a new version of the document and preserves the previous version. You can select "Rollback to Signature" to compare versions side by side.

These features may be a subset of those offered by full-fledged groupware applications and document-management systems, but complexity-averse businesses can establish workflow across platforms and between heterogeneous security models without significant administrative and development costs.

Web Capture
Where Acrobat 4.0 really takes flight is with new Web capture tools, leveraging the shift to the Web and its economies in publishing and information exchange. Better still, the PDF format has some noteworthy advantages over HTML for storing captured pages.

Acrobat downloads selected or all pages of a Web site, converting HTML text and graphics into PDF format and breaking long pages into standard-sized documents. The program handles frames, tables, background colors, forms, image maps, and password-secure areas, but not cascading style sheets, Java applets, and some JavaScript code. In practice, I was able to download virtually any site, archiving the day's New York Times in a 10-Mbyte file and assembling a portfolio of my InformationWeek articles by dragging and dropping the URLs from a tiled Internet Explorer into the Acrobat container.

You can maintain a daily snapshot of a news site by using the Refresh pages command; Acrobat follows the road map of the original capture, adding a list of new and changed pages while leaving unchanged pages in place. Once captured, you can do things not possible with saved HTML pages: zoom in on details, print the entire site with one command, and fill out Web forms offline. Acrobat provides its own HTTP stack, letting you automatically submit a completed form the next time you reconnect.

Acrobat 4.0 doesn't work well with Office 2000 documents, but the company says a patch is in the works. I'd like to see some built-in ability to round-trip captured pages back to their HTML roots; the original HTML data are already stored in the PDF file, and you can use Adobe Illustrator to reimport the pages. I'd also appreciate a way to manage a site's page list to remove unwanted links when refreshing snapshots.

Acrobat's new tools can help distribute Web-site management, providing easy-to-use tools for archiving, auditing, content approval, contract distribution, and quality control. It's also a useful device for IT departments or consultants seeking executive or line-of-business department sign-off and department managers delegating accountability.

This version of Acrobat is bringing some different tricks to its act. It's worth considering for a number of new functions that previous versions were unable to perform.