Thus far, I’ve avoided commenting on the Autodesk blogger vs. press embargo date fiasco, and I think I will continue doing so. Others have done a good enough job of covering the details and the ramifications, so I’m just going to forget about the gaffe and give Autodesk the benefit of the doubt on its intentions.

And before I get started talking about the new AutoCAD, I need to take a slight detour first, since one of the key elements in how CAD Journal will cover design technology is interaction and interoperability throughout the process, using all the tools that people use in their real jobs—not just the CAD software.

This includes the usual suspects in Microsoft Office: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Publisher, but also those infamous tools from Adobe: Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Acrobat. Which brings me to today’s topic, installing Adobe Creative Suite 1.3 Premium.

Opening the box reveals two obvious afterthoughts. The documentation was written before Acrobat 7 was released, so there is an errata stating that all references to Acrobat 6.0 Professional should read Acrobat 7.0 Professional. The second is that while the main Creative Suite case holds 6 CDs, there are actually 7 CDs in the box, so the 7th comes in a normal jewel case. What’s odd is that this CD is “Installer 3″ and the case is unlabeled—making its location separate and non-obvious from the “Installer 1″ and “Installer 2″ discs.

Accorging to the installer, the whole shebang will take 1,575MB. After installation, I can find 970MB of stuff in the Program Files\Adobe folder, so I’m guessing the rest is either Acrobat 7.0 Professional (turns out that’s what lives on “Installer 3″) or squirrled away in the Windows system folder and other secret places. After installing Acrobat, the total comes to 1.49GB, plus another 219MB in the Program Files\Common Files directory.

So now that I’ve got all the typical tools installed that I believe CAD software should be able to interoperate with, I’ll be testing AutoCAD and all the other usual suspects against these expectations.