Adobe ships Acrobat XI featuring new cloud services

Adobe is shipping Acrobat XI, a new version of its cross-platform PDF authoring and viewing software, featuring augmented tools for cloud services such as online forms and digital signatures.

Acrobat XI’s features are designed to make it easier to edit PDF documents and export them to Microsoft Office applications. The new version also offers across-the-board touch-based tablet capabilities.

A newly designed Edit Text and Images tool lets you edit text directly, automatically wrap paragraph text, search and replace words, and crop, adjust, or replace images in a PDF document. The new version also lets you resize and rotate images, and add links, bookmarks, forms, objects, files, and edit tables.

You can export PDFs from Acrobat to Microsoft PowerPoint or Word, RTF, or XML spreadsheet formats. The program also offers options for saving and retrieving content via Acrobat.com, Office 365, or SharePoint.

The new Acrobat version offers better integration with cloud services such as Adobe EchoSign for electronic signatures and FormsCentral for forms creation, data collection, and results analysis.

Acrobat XI and the new free Adobe Reader XI are touch-enabled for use on tablet devices so that PDF files with dynamic media content, files under shared review, or files needing electronic signatures, can be managed from various locations.

With Adobe Reader XI support for mobile devices such as iOS, Android, and Windows 8, users can collaborate by adding comments, interacting with PDF and Web forms, and using electronic signatures. It also supports application virtualization via Citrix XenApp software.

While LiveCycle Designer (Windows only) will no longer ship with Acrobat XI, users who upgrade will get a free version of LiveCycle, Adobe says.

Acrobat XI Pro for Windows and Mac, for $449, covers the full spectrum of new features, while the Windows-only Acrobat Standard, for $299, offers new editing and signing features. Upgrades to Acrobat XI Pro (cross platform) and Acrobat XI Standard (Windows only) cost $199 and $139 respectively.

EchoSign and FormsCentral each start at $15 per month. EchoSign costs $40 or more per month for a team of up to nine people, and goes up to $399 for a Global account of 10 or more users, which enables corporate branding. Academic pricing is available through the Adobe Education Store.

A 30-day free trial for Acrobat XI for Windows or Mac is available.

Adobe recommends 1GB of RAM on either a Microsoft Windows XP SP3 32 bit or SP 2 for 64 bit or newer system, or a Mac running OS X 10.6.4 or later.