There are three general routes to Acrobat output: Adobe's original 'distillation' route (via PostScript output), conversion of a DVI file, and the use of a direct PDF generator such PDFTeX (see the PDFTeX project) or MicroPress's VTeX (see commercial TeX implementations).
For simple documents (with no hyper-references), you can either
To translate all the LaTeX cross-referencing into Acrobat
links, you need a LaTeX package to suitably redefine
the internal commands. There are two of these for LaTeX, both
capable of conforming to the HyperTeX specification
(see Making hypertext documents from TeX):
Sebastian Rahtz's hyperref, and Michael Mehlich's
hyper. Hyperref
uses a configuration file to determine how it will generate hypertext;
it can operate using PDFTeX primitives, the hyperTeX
\specials, or DVI driver-specific \special commands.
Both dvips and Y&Y's DVIPSONE
translate the DVI with these \special commands into
PostScript acceptable to Distiller, and dvipdfm has \special
commands of its own.
There is no free implementation of all of Adobe Distiller's functionality, but recent versions of ghostscript provide pretty reliable distillation (but beware of the problems discussed in dvips output for distillation). Also, Distiller itself is now remarkably cheap (for academics at least).
For viewing (and printing) the resulting files, Adobe's Acrobat Reader is available for a fair range of platforms; for those for which Adobe's reader is unavailable, remotely current versions of ghostscript can display and print PDF files.