The latest version of Acrobat, published today, incorporates Flash technology developer Adobe acquired two years ago with its purchase of Macromedia.

Native Flash support in Acrobat 9 will allow video to be incorporated into documents and shared across multiple platforms.

A single Portable Document Format (pdf) portfolio can incorporate drawings, emails, spreadsheets and multimedia files into a single compressed file.

You can also capture web pages, or entire sites, in pdf format that preserves the original interactivity.

Other new features include a forms wizard and improved collaboration with the aid of hosted services, currently in beta, at Acrobat.com. And you can now navigate pdf pages using a Vista-style carousel.

The enhanced Flash support, including video, is also available in the new free Acrobat reader modules. There are three products in the paid-for range: the entry level Standard Editor, the Pro edition, and the Extended edition.

You need the extended edition to convert video to flash, and new geographic information features for pdf maps. Adobe bought Macromedia three years ago for an estimated $3.4b (£1.74b).

One irritating Acrobat feature has not been improved. Text capture in the Adobe 9 Reader is still rudimentary, taking no account of columns and other formatting, and ending each line with a paragraph mark.

Capture is blocked by design on many pdf documents, for copyright reasons, but the difficulty of extracting text in others severely the format's use for information exchange.

Steven Partridge, UK business development manager, said that some user companies did not want the feature enhanced. He added: "Many people have asked for it and the subject comes up every year when we go through the feature list. It will probably happen some day."

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