I found out recently Adobe was canceling Adobe Acrobat Capture.

Adobe Acrobat Capture was really the first scan to PDF program that scanned an image in front and put OCR copy in the background giving a searchable file with all the graphic elements of the original. Capture also had a limitation for the number of pages you could under its license. If you went over the license, you have to buy another copy. Adobe Acrobat Capture also had many scanning specific features. Many corporations used Adobe Acrobat Capture to put their documents in the company document management/intranet systems.

Recently Adobe has decided to cancel Capture and roll the scanning into the Standard version of Adobe Acrobat. Many of the Scanning automation features are not making the cut and while you can buy the older version of Capture it does not work well with many of the newer scanners.

Because of these limitation and that a lot of people don’t want to pay the full price of Adobe Acrobat, many customer have been looking at Art-Copy Enterprise and Scripting to do their document capture. While Art-Copy does not have every feature that Adobe Acrobat Capture had, it does have most of them and we are working hard to add any feature we don’t have to be able offer a viable alternative.

This brings me to the question of why is Adobe canceling Capture? My first thought is money; they can make everyone buy a full version of Adobe Acrobat Standard for each scanner. The other is that I know from experience, it is easier to develop and support one product instead of two. The last is that while scanning is probably not a growing market, document management is so they are focusing more on their growing products.

Let me know what your thoughts and experiences are with Adobe Acrobat.

We are getting ready to release our first Vista tested software next week - Art-Copy Scripting 4.0. Vista really messed up our development cycle. Vista broke our activation system so we had to wait for the vendor who provides our activation system to come out with their Vista version so we could come out with Vista software.

Also on Vista compatibility, we have been working with a printer company who is developing a new CD printer. Their first release will not support Vista. Many of our users who upgraded to Vista have found their scanners no longer work and big companies like HP have no plans to update their scanner drivers.

Which brings me to my point, if you are getting a new computer with all new hardware, only using MS Office software and buying from one vendor like Dell. You might be OK but if you have an existing computer don’t upgrade unless you want to buy lots of new third party software and hardware. Vista may be released but it is six years away from being good for the average person and by then Microsoft will have released their next operating system and we will do this all over again.

P.S. Dell has recently said it would be offering XP again as an OS option on its web site because so many customers were requesting it but as of the 15th of May, when I tried to buy a Dell XP computer for my father in-law, Vista was all that was available. It must be nice to be able to force software down our throats.