AECBYTES.COM REVIEWS ADOBE ACROBAT X PRO AND BLUEBEAM PDF REVU 9

Frequent visitors to “Reprographics 101” are aware that, from time to time, I post “mentions” of articles and reviews, authored by Dr. Lachmi Khemlani, that appear on the web-site, aecbytes.com.

Today, I noticed that Dr. Khemlani, owner/publisher of aecbytes.com, recently posted an article that provides a very, very extensive review of (and a comparison of) - Adobe Acrobat X Pro and Bluebeam PDF Revu 9.

The headings, below in “bold green” type, show you the four main “sections” of Dr. Khemani’s article.

Adobe Acrobat X Pro and Bluebeam PDF Revu 9

Here’s what Dr. Khemlani says to begin the article she wrote:

"In this review, we will explore the latest versions of the two most commonly used electronic publishing solutions in the AEC industry, Adobe Acrobat and Bluebeam PDF Revu, both of which were recently released."

In each of the two following sections, Dr. Khemlani provides an extensive review of each product:

Enhancements in Adobe Acrobat X Pro

Enhancements in Bluebeam PDF Revu 9

And, the last “section” of her article contains her analysis and conclusions:

Analysis and Conclusions

Immediately below, you’ll find three items I pulled from the last section of the article; I did this simply to “highlight” some of what she said in the last section:

“Given the long history of Adobe’s work with PDFs and its Acrobat product, it has been very sad to see Adobe retreating from the AEC electronic publishing space that it once helped to revolutionize. It is no longer developing an AEC-focused version of Acrobat, and is instead focused on addressing the needs of businesses in general and their document publishing and collaboration needs.”

“Adobe no longer exhibits at the annual AIA show (the 2011 convention is coming up later this week), and the outsourcing of its 3D PDF development to a third party vendor is a further sign that AEC is no longer one of its key target markets.”

“But as they say, “one person’s loss is another person’s gain,” and this has certainly been true for Bluebeam, which has nicely stepped in to fill the void in the AEC industry left behind by Adobe. Bluebeam was always focused on the PDF needs of AEC firms, but until now, it was missing a critical component—the ability to work with 3D PDF files created from models that the AEC industry is increasingly relying on for design and construction. As shown in this review, this capability is still far from perfect in Revu 9, which was not able to create a 3D PDF file from a U3D file like it was supposed it. But it could view a 3D model in a 3D PDF file and provided most of the capabilities for viewing and navigating it that Acrobat had. The fact that the model navigation interface of Revu is almost identical to that of Acrobat does not give Bluebeam many points for originality—hopefully, it can come up with better and more innovative ways of working with 3D models as it further develops its 3D PDF capabilities.”

Finally, if you are in the reprographics business, you should (let’s just say that I think you would want to) keep up to date on software your A/E customers are using that will affect how you serve the needs of A/E customers. I encourage (if not “urge) you to read the entire article Dr. Khemlani wrote. If you are not technically inclined, then perhaps you might want to get your C.T.O. or “chief” I.T. guy to read the article, so he/she can explain it to you! Here’s a link to the complete article:

http://www.aecbytes.com/review/2011/Acrobat10-Revu9.html

About the Author

Lachmi Khemlani is founder and editor of AECbytes. She has a Ph.D. in Architecture from UC Berkeley, specializing in intelligent building modeling, and consults and writes on AEC technology. She can be reached at lachmi@aecbytes.com.