Acrobat X Is Available

As planned, today Adobe terminated the Acrobat Prerelease program and made Acrobat X available to the public. Unfortunately, none of SYCODE’s 10 Acrobat 3D data exchange plug-ins will work with it. Why? Because Adobe has removed the 3D PDF library from Acrobat and killed off the top end Acrobat Pro Extended version. The 3D PDF library is the technology used by third party developers like myself to work with the 3D parts of a 3D PDF file. Now the top end product is Acrobat Pro and it does not come with the 3D PDF library.

To make our plug-ins work with Acrobat Pro, you will now need to pay an additional $400 to buy a product called 3D PDF Converter from Tetra 4D, which is a company that Tech Soft 3D handed the 3D PDF library to, Tech Soft 3D being the company that Adobe partnered with to continue developing 3D PDF because they finally realized that they could not do it themselves. It’s a long and complicated story. One that gives me a pretty good idea of how a big company can get into something without understanding what is involved and then get out of it without understanding what is involved.

One of these days I intend to write about this at length. If I do, the post will be titled “The Adobe 3D PDF Train Wreck“, because that is precisely what it is.