Adobe Acrobat

Adobe Acrobat is a family of application software developed by Adobe Systems to view, create, manipulate, print and manage files in Portable Document Format (PDF).[3] All members of the family, except Adobe Reader (formerly Acrobat Reader), are commercial software; Adobe Reader however, is available as freeware and can be downloaded from Adobe's web site. Adobe Reader enables users to view and print PDF files but has negligible PDF creation capabilities.[4] Acrobat and Reader are widely used as a way to present information with a fixed layout similar to a paper publication.

History

Since the early 1990s, the Acrobat product has had several competitors, some of which used their own document formats, such as:
AnyView from Binar Graphics
Common Ground from No Hands Software
Envoy from WordPerfect Corporation
Folio from NextPage
Replica from Farallon Computing
WorldView from Interleaf
DjVu from AT&T Laboratories/DjVu Project/LizardTech/Celartem/Caminova
By the late 1990s PDF had become the de facto standard, and the others had become largely historical footnotes. This in turn has led to many more competitors for Adobe Acrobat, providing both free and commercial programs that create or manipulate PDF, such as Ghostscript, Foxit, Nitro PDF and Nuance Communications. Adobe also allows Acrobat plug-ins to be developed by third parties, which can add extra functions within the Acrobat program.

Product names

Adobe has changed the names of the products in the Acrobat family regularly, also splitting-up, joining, or discontinuing products. Between version 3 and 5, Standard and Professional versions were one product simply called Adobe Acrobat.
As of October 2009, the current main members of the Adobe Acrobat family are:
Adobe Reader 9 (Windows, Mac and Unix)
Adobe Acrobat 9
Adobe Acrobat 9 Standard (Windows only)
Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro (Windows & Mac only)
Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro Extended (Windows only; includes Adobe Presenter)
A growing collection of free web services launched via the Acrobat.com service such as Adobe Buzzword, Connect Now, Create PDF, and Share.
None of the products in Acrobat family has adopted the two-letter CS3 icons, although rendered similarly.

source : Wikipedia