FIGURE G

Acrobat Reader's clean interface makes navigation a breeze.

The page slider bar on the right side of the screen allows you to scroll up and down on the page. When the PDF is converted for handheld viewing, the page breaks remain intact. Moving to the bottom of the page, the folder icon in the lower left corner returns you to the file list.

The next icon opens the Table of Contents and Comments list. To toggle between the two lists, simply tap and select the other list from the dropdown menu. Not only is it nice to be able to navigate through a document using the table of contents headings, but if your organization uses Acrobat for electronic document markup, Acrobat Reader for Palm OS can be a great time saver. Although you cannot mark up documents using this program (yet), this feature provides a great way for you to at least read through your team's comments while on the go and assess the status of the review process and the project as a whole.

The next interface element is the document position bar at the bottom of the screen that allows you to jump through the document page by page. Tap the arrow to the left to go back to the first page; tap the arrow on the right to go to the end of the document. You can also tap and drag the position bar to quickly move though the document. The page indicator in the lower left corner of the screen will update to show you which page you've selected as you move the stylus across the bar. You can also jump directly to any page within the PDF by tapping the page indicator.

Another nice innovation Adobe implemented involves the shortcut strokes for common commands, such as /C for Copy. Feel free to omit the command stroke up front; in other words, to copy text, just select the text you'd like to copy and simply write a C in the Graffiti area. The text will be copied to the clipboard. Writing the letter O (for Open) takes you to the document list. In short, any of the shortcut letters included in the menus can be executed without the command stroke. It may be a small thing, but it sure is a time saver.

Image support is adequate but not overly impressive. After all, most Palm handhelds only have a 160 x 160 pixel grayscale screen. Of course, if you create your images as simple, 256 color (or shades of gray) graphics, the results can be rather nice, as is the case with the Acrobat logo on the splash screen.

The one feature that really wowed me the first time I saw it was the table support. Acrobat Reader for Palm OS can fully render tables in tagged PDF files, allowing you to read and scroll though the tabular data. And since many of today's business documents tend to contain a lot of data tables, this feature can really come in handy.

Simply tap and hold the table with your stylus (what's generally referred to as a "tap and a half" in laptop touch pad parlance), and the screen changes to show the table in a magnified format.