Ted Padova’s AUC Blog

For those who use the Adobe Creative Suite, you may have noticed the appearance of the Go to Bridge tool (see Figure 1) in the File toolbar in Acrobat and the addition of the Browse command in the File menu. Some of you may have seen the tool appear in Acrobat 8.0, but lost it after installing Acrobat 8.1.

Personally, I like the shortcut to open Adobe Bridge while working in Acrobat. The Organizer is a great tool for accessing commonly used files such as reference documents like the Acrobat complete help PDF file, the JavaScript Specification Manual, and a host of different files you can use for samples and help documents for Adobe LiveCycle Designer.

However, when poking around my hard drive, I prefer to use Adobe Bridge. The Bridge window shows thumbnails of all the files and folders on mounted drives and I can easily locate documents in a new improved interface introduced in version CS3.

One can easily launch Bridge from the Status Bar (Windows) or the Dock (Macintosh) so it’s really not a big deal if the Go to Bridge tool is not showing up in your File toolbar. But, having the tool in Acrobat, just adds a little more ease in accessing Bridge.

To get the tool to show up in the File toolbar is a painful process if you don’t see it now in Acrobat 8.1. If you installed Acrobat, then later install the Adobe Creative Suite, the tool appears in Acrobat 8.0. However, installing the Acrobat 8.1 patch, eliminates the tool from the File toolbar and it won’t show up anywhere in the More Tools window.

If you install Acrobat from the CS3 installer DVD-Rom along with the CS3 apps, then upgrade Acrobat, the tool remains installed in the File toolbar. However, if you deinstall Acrobat and need to reinstall it, running the 8.0 installer gets the tool back in the File toolbar, but upgrading to 8.1 looses the tool. Your only solution is to completely deinstall the CS3 applications, then run the installer and install Acrobat along with the CS3 apps and later upgrade to Acrobat 8.1. This is a task that will take you hours due to the unbearably slow install process for the CS3 applications.

If you happen to have several licensed copies of Acrobat and the Go to Bridge tool appears on one machine while not showing up on other machines, you can’t copy the plug-ins folder from one computer to another to get the tool installed. It’s a plug-in, but for some reason it won’t show up by copying plug-ins from one computer to another. Also, don’t look at repairing the Acrobat installation. That won’t do it either. Again, the only way I’ve found is to do a complete deinstall/reinstall of Acrobat and the CS3 apps from the CS3 installer DVD.

If you happen to find an easier solution, post it here.

ted

This entry was posted on Friday, October 5th, 2007 at 5:52 pm and is filed under Acrobat 8. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.