Acrobat DC, a new product from Adobe, has been launched at the heart of the company’s new Adobe Document Cloud. It delivers free e-signing as part of the integrated solution, via eSign Services (formerly Adobe EchoSign), to allow users to electronically send and sign any document from any device for no additional cost.

Adobe Document Cloud consists of a set of integrated services that use a consistent online profile and personal document hub. Adobe says users will be able to create, review, approve, sign and track documents whether on a desktop or mobile device. Acrobat DC, with a touch-enabled user interface, will be available both via subscription and one-time purchase.

Users can begin working on a document on one device and then pick up where they left off on another device using a new technology called Mobile Link.

In order to get paper documents easily into digital form, the mobile version of Acrobat DC uses the device’s camera and then transforms that picture into a fully addressable PDF document.

“People and businesses are stuck in document-based processes that are slow, wasteful, and fragmented. While most forms of content have successfully made the move to digital (books, movies, music), documents and the process of working with them have not, and that needs to change,” said Bryan Lamkin, senior vice president of Technology and Corporate Development at Adobe.

“Adobe Document Cloud will revolutionise and simplify how people get work done with critical documents.”

Acrobat DC uses Photoshop imaging technology to convert any paper document into a digital, editable file that can be sent for signature.

Acrobat DC can open a scanned image and determine the text regions via image processing techniques. Acrobat DC then dynamically creates “synthesised” fonts to help preserve the look-and-feel. This solution scales across different image resolutions and works on multiple languages.

It also aims to address problems with scanned images and documents that were captured via tablet or phone. “These images frequently suffer from incorrect perspectives, shadows and tough lighting, often making them unusable. Acrobat DC introduces a solution to transform these images into a digital document suitable for reuse, extraction, and archival. Powered by advanced image processing techniques from Adobe’s Photoshop “know how”, Acrobat DC performs automatic text improvement, background noise and shadow removal, and intuitive cleaning controls – all without any degradation. We further use a set of techniques to accurately detect the boundaries of documents and fix their perspective.”

For enterprise users, the e-Sign capabilities of the Document Cloud offer native support and integration for salesforce.com, Office 365 and Microsoft Dynamics, among other line of business systems.

A personal “Document Profile” is able to be created which saves your signature, and enables you to save data securely in a personal autofill collection.

Two new mobile apps, Adobe Acrobat mobile and Adobe Fill & Sign DC, allow for creation, editing, comment and signing of documents directly on a mobile devices.

Document Cloud for enterprise offers solutions for industries including healthcare and insurance, financial services, media and entertainment, government, and schools and universities. In addition, enterprises can centrally manage Document Cloud and Creative Cloud user accounts and licenses with single sign-on (SSO) in the Adobe Enterprise Dashboard.

Acrobat customers will automatically receive new Acrobat DC and the Document Cloud as soon as it is available. Acrobat DC will be sold as both a subscription and a perpetual license upon availability. Find out more here.