Adobe today announced that Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional software will be integrated into Adobe Creative Suite 2.3 Premium. Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional enhances Adobe Creative Suite 2.3 and its support for Adobe PDF workflows with advanced tools for creating, collaborating, and controlling the output of high-quality Adobe PDF files.

Adobe Creative Suite 2.3 Premium also bundles Dreamweaver 8, the industry-leading Web design and development tool. Dreamweaver 8 supports best practices and broader Web workflows for efficiently designing, developing and maintaining standards-based Web sites and applications. Future versions of Adobe Creative Suite will integrate Dreamweaver as a replacement for Adobe GoLive. Adobe will continue to develop GoLive as a standalone product (although GoLive has been removed from the main products list on Adobe's front page).

Adobe expects to ship Adobe Creative Suite 2.3 plus Dreamweaver 8 in English, French, German, and Japanese in the fourth quarter 2006. Estimated street prices will be USD$1199 for the full version of Adobe Creative Suite 2.3 Premium, USD$159 for an upgrade from Adobe Creative Suite 2 Premium, and USD$549 for an upgrade from Creative Suite 1.x Premium and Standard. Information about other language versions, as well as pricing, upgrade, and support policies for other countries is available on Adobe's web site.

Oh, one more thing... it seems this update does not bring the Adobe Creative Suite to Universal Application status. Sorry, Intel users.

Adobe Creative Suite 2.3 Premium integrates Acrobat 8 Professional to enable creative and print professionals to efficiently create, collaborate with, and automate output of Adobe PDF files. In addition to supporting industry-standard PDF/X-1a and PDF/X-3 files, Acrobat 8 Professional now outputs PDF/X-4 for native transparency support, as well as PDF/A for long-term archiving.

Creative workgroups can now easily set up shared reviews so participants can see and respond to each other's comments as they review. Users of Adobe Reader 8 can participate in new shared reviews when enabled by Acrobat 8, as well as email- and Web-based reviews, digitally sign documents, and submit completed forms. Acrobat 8 Professional also introduces the Start Meeting feature with built-in access to Adobe Acrobat Connect (formerly Breeze), a Web-hosted subscription service that supports real-time online collaboration for geographically dispersed creative teams and their clients (available in the U.S. only at ship).

With Creative Suite 2.3, printers can automatically fix problems identified during pre-flight review in PDF, including hairlines, color space, transparency flattening, font embedding, and image resolution. Enhanced support for automated JDF workflows enables printers to automatically output and validate PDF files from Adobe InDesign CS2 software. Tighter integration with Creative Suite 2.3, including the ability to synchronize color settings between Acrobat and other components, support for transparency flattener presets, and a shared print engine, further enhance PDF-based workflows.