Carl Young’s AcroViews

Look, I am a big fan of Acrobat, so please don’t take the following as Adobe or Acrobat bashing. But as an everyday user, there are some things I wish Acrobat did differently. Also, let me point out that unlike the people who wrote Word Annoyances I don’t have enough complaints to make up an entire book!

Number 1 on my list of Acrobat Annoyances is the absence of a preference for Save or File | Open options like Microsoft has for Word for Windows.

Why? Because Acrobat always defaults to My Documents for saving or opening. Personally, I hardly ever want to save a PDF in My Documents. Like most professionals, I want to save (or retrieve) PDFs from a network drive that gets backed up regularly.

Let me give you an example. This morning I opened a PDF buried deep inside a network drive. I extracted some pages and clicked on the Acrobat Save icon. Did Acrobat offer to save the file in the folder I had painstakingly navigated to?

Heck, no. Acrobat presented the Save dialog box inside of My Documents. I had to painfully retrace my steps on the network drive to save the extracted pages in the same folder as the source document. (My work around is to create shortcuts to frequently-used folders in My Documents exclusively for use in Acrobat.)

When I have complained about this behavior in the past, the response from Adobe is that Acrobat relies on the operating system for default opening and saving locations, which is my case is WindowsXP.

Let me say in reply that Microsoft recognizes this is a problem because it gives Word users a preferences setting. Please see the screen shot of the Preferences settings in Word 2007 below for an example. I also manage some software projects and know that adding this functionality is not a huge deal.

Am I just easily annoyed, or does always having to navigate out of My Documents bug anyone else?

See larger image.

My earlier post on submitting form data via E-mail from Reader generated quite a few comments. I thought I would follow up with more details on how to make the process work.

1) Don’t use JavaScript. Reader won’t accept the very common e-mail JavaScript you have probably seen.

2) Do use html. Reader will recognize the html command “mailto:” as in “mailto:youremail@youraddress.com.” See the button on the left in my example.

This screen shot shows the basic setup.

To add a subject line, cc:, or bcc: see this Adobe TechNote.

3) Do not choose “PDF The Complete Document” in Export Options. Reader can only submit data from PDF forms unless the form has additional rights. If you choose “PDF The Complete Document” Reader assumes you are breaking the rules and will refuse to e-mail the document.

I’d stick with FDF as the data export format unless you have a specific reason for using another format.

An interview with Bruce R. Chizen, Adobe Systems, Inc. Chief Executive Officer, was published by the New York Times on Saturday. Among other things, Chizen makes it clear that we will see a new version of Acrobat by December:

One of the issues as it relates to our investors is that some of the new products we have planned will not be released until later this year and into next year. Acrobat 8 is coming to the market at the end of the year. And in the spring, we anticipate shipping the next release of Creative Suite. In it, not only are there new features in each of the individual applications, like InDesign and Photoshop, but in addition it is the first release in which we will see integration between the Adobe products and the former Macromedia products, which our customers have been asking for.

I will assume that if we are going to see Acrobat 8 by the end of the year, then we will also see new versions of Reader and LiveCycle Designer.