Acrobat 9: Product Review

I would be nice to be able to include a non-form page in a fill-out form PDF, instead of having to make a “portfolio” of the individual pages.

I just wanted you to know that Acrobat Pro 9 is rife with problems.

OCR is seriously crippled. Version 8 has no problem OCR’ing the same files that crash on 9.

WordPerfect X4 cannot open a version 9 pdf and reports the file to be “corrupt or encrypted.”

After some careful testing on several computers with various files we’ve decided to revert back to version 8.

I couldn’t find anything on the web reporting these problems but I thought that you might have an Acrobat contact who may be able to shed some light on the issues.

Oh cmon Scott, you say it’s “Rife with problems” and then list a feature few people use, an application apparently ONLY you use, and…. that’s it?

Roberto, there are about 2000 people in my organization that rely heavily on Acrobat and Wordperfect.

Would it be better if problems were not reported?

From my organization’s point of view, Acrobat 9 IS “rife” with problems to the point where we cannot use it.

Just installed Acrobat 9 Pro and the reader v9. Every time I try to open a PDF file via the web browse from any web site, my IE ver 6.0.2900.2180 crashes. Has anyone else experienced this problem?

I purchased Acrobat 9 Pro Extended to prepare pdfs (originally from pagemaker utility) to work in a digital magazine software application (Zinio). Acrobat 6 worked flawlessly, as did Acrobat 9 PE for about two weeks, except the latter failed after the initial install and now corrupts the files. I’ve even scraped it off the computer and have reinstalled it, but with no improvement. I’m awaiting a tech support explanation, but I’m highly frustrated.

Corel and Abobe are mortal enemies. It is such a surprise that Adobe makes their products a pain in the ass for any other vendor?

To be fair – the PDF spec is Adobe’s technology. But it’s come to point that they are predatory in the marketplace due to their success with it.

New Adobe stuff is beyond bloated now, and NOT all happy-land for designers.

A bit off topic, that’s why I use CorelDRAW and am just short of being a millionaire as a graphic designer. It’s twice as fast as illustrator FWIW.

If you are serious about productivity, take a look.

I also installed 9 and reverted back to 8 because of problems. I found many problems with fonts and misalignment with 9.

Until these issues are resolve I cannot upgrade as I could not run business as usual.

also having problems with 9 crashing our document file manager (oasys columbus), and that makes it a non-starter, reverted back to 8….

Decided to go to Acrobat Pro 9 from Pro 7. Big mistake. Uninstalled old program first. Installed 9.0 – problems. Uninstall and re-install with Antivirus off – something went wrong – Install unsuccessful. Installed again. Tried scanning something would not work with Dell AIO 962. Tried several things including downloading updates with each successful install – no use. Called tech support. They offered a few ideas – nothing worked. They asked me to see if the scanner would send to other programs like paint and word, no problem. Their answer, call Dell there is something wrong with the scanner drivers. What! Unacceptable! Tech said that scanner drivers are not being recognized, perhaps uninstall and reinstall, but call Dell.

I did find that if you use “custom” you can bypass Acrobat and get things to work but not able to adjust scan settings, so things look terrible.

Print to Adobe from other programs. Works when it wants to. Tried several programs had luck with most, but QuickBooks was a touch and go. It would print to Acrobat one time and not the next, only to work again a minute later. Sending different messages when it failed. During this, a Windows configuration screen came up “Please wait while windows configures Adobe”, “Do you want to run in repair mode”

System start-up now takes three times longer. The Disk Space is 1.5 GB, and leaves setup files on pc. Tried to open existing pdf that had a text field – pop up that a plug in was needed. Closed file – it opened on its own with message that plug in was needed. I closed file – it opened on its own again! This happened about 7 times until I closed Acrobat.

Multiple computer restarts, a few “repair” installs, and it still runs lousy. For reference, Windows XP, SP 3. I keep my computer tuned up and running smooth – at least I did until Acrobat 9. 6 plus hours trying to get this to work – still not working! Unless you are a programmer – avoid Acrobat 9.0.

I am also sorry to report that after having had too many problems with Acrobat 9, our organisation has decided to revert back to Acrobat 8. In particular, as we often have to make some modifications to PDF files beyond what Acrobat allows us to do, we are very disappointed with the fact that we cannot open files created with Acrobat 9 in Photoshop. The error message we get is “There was an error processing the document. The file may be damaged or corrupted.”

I cannot understand why a product cannot be installed by an administrator and then not used by other users on a pc.

I purchased Acrobat 9 as part of the CS4 Master Collection, with no real plans to use it. I’m perfectly happy with OS X preview for viewing (and minor editing) PDFs. I like the lightning fast render speed as opposed to waiting for 20 seconds for Acrobat to launch, and bloated interface.

Two major beefs – first, the Adobe updater seems to treat Acrobat as separate from Creative Suite. This is dumb. Why can’t it update ALL Adobe apps since it is the “Adobe Updater,” not the “CS4 updater.” Here I’ve been running it on a regular basis, and I realize that I’m still on Acrobat 9.0.0, and my version of Camera RAW has never been updated either. This is ridiculous and shoddy programming, which I suppose is to be expected from Adobe.

Second, I really, really hate how Adobe Acrobat takes control of all PDF functionality on Mac OS X once you install it. Now I have an issue where Acrobat won’t even launch – just crashes at startup every time – so I can’t even get into to the preferences to let it know that I want Preview to open PDFs from my browsers, not Acrobat. I’m totally stuck – anytime I try to view a PDF online it brings my whole browser down. I really didn’t want to have to take time out of my schedule to troubleshoot how to make Acrobat work since I rarely use it. But I do look at PDFs online, so I’ll probably have to uninstall it.

Adobe is spiraling down the toilet with shoddy, bloated applications, that are overpriced and often have critical issues that never get fixed – they just roll out a whole new Creative Suite and force everyone to pay their expensive upgrade fees. I for one am disgusted and sick of it. Every version of CS takes longer to install, adds complexity, changes interfaces making it essential to relearn basic functions. The software is overall getting worse, not better. They need to do what Apple is doing with Snow Leopard and focus on OPTIMIZING the way these apps perform rather than filling them with features that users didn’t want or ask for.

Instead of just signing the praises of papa Adobe, the publications of the Scott Kelby empire including Layers should take Adobe to task with really critical reviews, not just puff pieces. Four and a half stars my butt – this product is critically flawed as noted by many posters above, and now won’t even let me view, let alone edit PDFs on my computer. Garbage. Add to that the CRITICAL vulnerability Adobe introduced into the latest Acrobat reader by including Flash, and I would say this “upgrade” is a disaster.

To the designer who was singing the praises of Corel products – I believe you. Although I don’t know the Corel products myself, we worked with a designer who insisted on using them for speed and productivity. Watching him work, I can understand why. The speed with which he could pump out work was astonishing.

I purchased Acrobat 9 to convert Word files for a book to a PDF as required by my commercial printer.
It readily combines the 5 files into one of 94 x A4 pages … but there is text dropout (normally 1-3 words at a time) on virtually every page.
And it changes pagination so that I get a bold title at the foot of a page and the first paragraph under that new title on the next page !
I can type in the dropped out text of course, but cannot find a way to shift the lonely paragraph title onto the proper next page.
Most disappointed.

> Two major beefs – first, the Adobe updater seems to treat Acrobat as separate from Creative Suite.

Doesn’t work that way on my systems. The updater included Acrobat updates as well as all the CS4 updates.

> Second, I really, really hate how Adobe Acrobat takes control of all PDF functionality on Mac OS X once you install it. ……..so I can’t even get into to the preferences to let it know that I want Preview to open PDFs from my browsers, not Acrobat.

It doesn’t take control at all. You change the desired program at the desktop level. Just Get Info, set the Open With program, and click Change All.

I purchased an ancient version of Acrobat. Version 4, when it was new. in windows XP Been using it for many years to print PDF.

I Installed the free acrobat 9 off the web, now it has broken the whole windows printing system. I cant print to ANY printer, let alone the PDFwriter. Why would it stuff up such things.

I aplaud Riaz for the comments. I agree having CS4 as well very bloated fat code, where the programmers were probably paid by Intel per line of source code.

Actually it was adobe critic I applaud. The names are below the post. (Maybe I should criticize this page….)

Riaz your not so bad.. Dont take it personally

In Acrobat 9 Pro, when viewing a document using the PAGES Panel. The last fiew pages
cannot be seen or clicked on unless you scroll
to them using the arrows in the tool bar.
Is there a patch or a fix for this.

Thank You