New features summary | December 2021 release of Acrobat DC

Acrobat DC

Acrobat DC with Adobe Document Cloud services is the complete PDF solution for working with your most important documents across desktop, web, and mobile devices. Update your Acrobat desktop and mobile apps, or sign in to Acrobat Web to experience the new features and improvements.

Acrobat DC desktop app

December 2021 release

Acrobat introduces enhanced editing capabilities with a seamless multi-page editing experience. You no longer have to manually adjust the content to fix overlaps while editing a PDF document. The new auto-adjust layout mode in Acrobat automatically adjusts the content and reflows.

Key features:

  • Text and images adjust automatically across pages as you edit.
  • Document layout and margin are preserved while editing.
  • Navigate and select text freely across paragraphs using the cursor.
  • Make text or images inline or in front of document content.
  • Select content easily across boxes on a page.

For more information, see Edit PDFs with the new auto-adjust layout experience.

Note:

The new auto-adjust layout experience is available only for qualified English PDF documents. Adobe is testing this new experience in Acrobat. Therefore, the experience may not be available to all users.

If you compose an email and attach a PDF document, Acrobat prompts you to use the Request Signatures tool based on the PDF filename and the email subject. For example, if you use terms like form, application, and more, Acrobat recognizes these terms and prompts you to use the Request Signatures tool in Acrobat. You see one of the following prompts:

Request Signature prompt
Variant 1

Request Signature prompt
Variant 2

When you open a document that requires filling or signing, Acrobat prompts you to use the Request Signatures tool.

Request Signature prompt

For ease of access, the Organize Pages sub-tools like insert, delete, or rotate pages are now available from the following menus: File, Edit, and Quick Tools.

File > Insert Pages
File > Insert Pages

Edit > Delete Pages or Rotate Pages
Edit > Delete Pages or Rotate Pages

Quick tools menu - Delete Pages, Rotate Pages
Quick tools

Acrobat tools like Edit and Convert now support the new File Explorer context menu of Windows 11. The tools appear in the menu as per the action the filetype supports. Additionally, the Share option is also added to the Windows native share feature.

Edit with Adobe Acrobat
Edit with Adobe Acrobat

Convert to Adobe PDF
Convert to Adobe PDF

Share with Adobe Acrobat DC
Share with Adobe Acrobat DC

Acrobat provides a seamless experience in collaboration workflows of view and review files. When you unshare a review file, the file is removed from all file listings in Acrobat and Document Cloud. Similarly, the context board now appears consistently for all the shared files listed in Acrobat's Recents or Starred tabs.

Similarly, when you search for files in Acrobat, the results include files shared with you, all agreements, and non PDF files saved on your Document Cloud account.

Advanced logging is now enabled to collect detailed information in case Acrobat crashes on macOS. The log will help Adobe isolate the root cause and improve the application's stability.

Several bugs are fixed to improve application stability on macOS.

To improve Acrobat performance, compatibility with older software like Visual Studio 2010 redistributable dependencies are now removed for the printer driver.

Acrobat Reader mobile app

September 2021, October 2021, and November 2021 updates

iPhone and iPad

Many enhancements are made to make the Fill & Sign experience smoother and more intuitive, like:

  • Users now get a bounding box for an identified text field. This helps in determining the start and end of the form.

  • Provide alignment of the filled text field.

  • Introduced auto-scroll for users filling the form fields.

The share icon is now restored. The Acrobat prompt asking you to Send a Copy from the share screen is now removed. Several bugs related to share a copy of the PDF are now fixed.

Acrobat Reader app now includes Dynamic Type support in all Setting panels to improve readability. The changes can be seen in the Subscriptions, Preferences, and User Profile panels. 

The following enhancements are made to the Liquid Mode:

  • Acrobat iOS now supports links found in emails generated by the DocGen web service.  When the user clicks a link from an email, the app will launch and open the document in Liquid Mode.

  • Auto Open bug fixes and updates

  • General stability fixes and overall improvements in Liquid Mode.

  • Upgrade to Intune 14.6.0.
  • Update from ACP libraries to AEP libraries 
  • Updated Branch SDK
  • Menu framework improvements.
  • Restructured Google Drive code to make it compatible with Swift Package Manager.
  • Fixes for critical bugs, crashes, and design issues.

Get the latest Acrobat Reader on your iPhone and iPad.

Android

The Compress tool now supports three levels of compression and provides users with more control over the output file. Support for Delayed paywall for Compress tool is also added. 

  • Enabled Share (share sheet) on shared files - This allows you to use the Send a Copy option on shared files.  
  • Fetch collaborator’s public profile info for shared assets - Instead of using the private profile of the user, Acrobat now uses the public profile for displaying user profile information for shared assets.

  • Colorado on Device (CoD) expansion – With this release, memory improvements to CoD have been made that enable the roll-out of the feature to low memory (4-6GB) devices. Several inconsistencies are fixed between streaming and Colorado on-device analytics.
  • Doc gen playground link support - Acrobat app now supports the opening of Doc gen playground link directly in Liquid mode.

  • DNS caching for fixing server routing issues - Caching the DNS info on the client-side is now enabled so that the Liquid Mode GET and POST request syncing issues are resolved and no transaction fails.

  • Android SDK update - As per Google's mandate for Android apps to move to API level 30 by 30 November 2021, the Acrobat app now targets API level 30. For more information, see the behavioral changes in storage permissions handling on Android 11 and above.

  • e-Privacy experiment rollout - The e-Privacy experiment is now rolled out to 100% users on September 21. It is a legal requirement to show legal notice to all users. You must accept it to continue using the app. 

  • Fixed top crashes reported on Play store.

  • Dropbox SDK update - The Dropbox SDK is now updated as per the mandate received from the Dropbox team. Dropbox is deprecating support for TLS 1.0 & 1.1.

  • Facebook SDK update - Beginning October 5, 2021, Facebook is removing the support for Facebook login using Android embedded browsers to reduce phishing attempts on Android. This required all Android apps supporting Facebook login to upgrade to version 8.2.0 (or later) of the Facebook SDK for Android.

Get the latest Acrobat Reader on your Android device.

Acrobat online services

September 2021, October 2021, and November 2021 updates

The Adobe Acrobat for Microsoft Edge makes your document tasks easier and faster by allowing you to interact with Acrobat directly from within Edge. For more information, see Adobe Acrobat extension for Google Chrome.

 Adobe

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