Adobe Acrobat Reader Information.

Computing & Information Services Department
author: jim.cerny@unh.edu

Adobe's Acrobat technology is a way to retain an image-like representation of a document, -- with the layout, graphics, and fonts -- without the need for special viewer or browser to have any special graphics or fonts capability except Acrobat Reader (which is free). It is not really an image that is used, but an extension of Adobe's PostScript technology called Portable Document Format (PDF).

To promote the technology, Adobe gives away Acrobat Reader for free and charges for the other Acrobat products used to create PDF files. Acrobat Reader is installable as a Web browser plug-in for Netscape (or MS Explorer) called PDFViewer, which in turn invokes Acrobat Exchange.

Current versions of graphical browsers such as Netscape and Explorer have a plug-ins directory and on launch of the browser it automatically becomes aware of any plug-ins installed in that directory. Then, while using the browser, when you click on a link that is to a PDF document, the browser automatically invokes Acrobat to display the file. It is good practice on Web pages to clearly mark PDF files and one way is with a small Acrobat icon.

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Sources of information.

• List of system requirements.
• Acrobat Reader download page.

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