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Problem modifying Comments & Mark-up

Keldar
Registered: Jun 24 2009
Posts: 3

Hi,

I have been using acrobat for many years to either mark-up other peoples drawings or enhance my own in order to communicate design issues. Everything worked fine up to Version 7, however we recently upgraded to version 8 and things stopped working. There seem to be two main feature problems

1) The properties dialog box is greyed out and does not capture the properties of a selected element, thus preventing the propoerties from being modified.

2) The grips on elements such as lines, arrows, shapes etc show up but the cursor works intermittently. it should change to a reverse white arrow allowing the grip to be moved, but sometimes it doesn't. Closing the file sometimes re-enables this, but a lot of the time even this does not help. Also the dynamics of the graphics seems a bit buggy, grips still remain in the old place after a move. This happens on wholesale move of an object as well as just moving one vector using the grips (when it does work)

Our Central IT guys have just updated me to Acrobat Pro version 9.0.0 in an attempt to fix the problem, but I am still struggling with it... I don't know of anyone else in our company that is suffering with this in an office of 200+ users

Has anyone else come across this...?

Thanks in advance

Ian

My Product Information:
Acrobat Pro 9.0, Windows
calguy248
Registered: Jul 13 2009
Posts: 2
Hi,

This is a longstanding known issue; it happens to me CONSTANTLY, using both Acrobat 8 Pro & Acrobat 9 Pro. Tech support is useless and refuses to acknowledge or solve this extremely annoying problem.I need to highlight text (using different opacities of highlighting) in a variety of PDFs: scanned-ClearScan OCR, ebooks, downloaded journal articles, etc. None of them are "restricted" in commenting, etc.

Within a few minutes of editing, when I go to highlight some text or change opacity, one of two things will happen spontaneously.

1) Properties bar disappears entirely when text selected (erroneously changes to "No current selection")
or
2) Properties bar suddenly greyed out when text selected

It is absolutely inconceivable that Adobe is unaware of this absurd defect -- and is unwilling or unable to fix such a simple functionality so that it works consistently and correctly!

Can someone with more expertise PLEASE, PLEASE explain this problem or suggest a fix?

thank you,
calguy248
Keldar
Registered: Jun 24 2009
Posts: 3
It seems to me that the developers have tried to enhance the mark-up tools by adding some fancy animated graphics (scrolling highlighted borders etc) and possibly run out of time and shipped a product with some half finished functionality that also undermines what used to be quite useful reliable working functionality...!
The only solution I have at the moment is to go two steps backwards from Acrobat 9 Pro to Acrobat 7 Pro, until someone can sort this out... Our Tech guys have confirmed tho, that in order to fully perform this roll back, they are going to have to delete my profile and start afresh, which is a major inconvenience...

Very poor!
lkassuba
ExpertTeam
Registered: Jun 28 2007
Posts: 3636
calguy248 wrote:
Hi,This is a longstanding known issue; it happens to me CONSTANTLY, using both Acrobat 8 Pro & Acrobat 9 Pro. Tech support is useless and refuses to acknowledge or solve this extremely annoying problem.I need to highlight text (using different opacities of highlighting) in a variety of PDFs: scanned-ClearScan OCR, ebooks, downloaded journal articles, etc. None of them are "restricted" in commenting, etc.

Within a few minutes of editing, when I go to highlight some text or change opacity, one of two things will happen spontaneously.

1) Properties bar disappears entirely when text selected (erroneously changes to "No current selection")
or
2) Properties bar suddenly greyed out when text selected

It is absolutely inconceivable that Adobe is unaware of this absurd defect -- and is unwilling or unable to fix such a simple functionality so that it works consistently and correctly!

Can someone with more expertise PLEASE, PLEASE explain this problem or suggest a fix?

thank you,
calguy248
Do you have multiple installation of Acrobat and/or Reader on this machines? Have you tried the latest point update of Acrobat 9?

Lori Kassuba is an AUC Expert and Community Manager for AcrobatUsers.com.

rdc
Registered: Apr 8 2010
Posts: 19
Yeah this has been going on for a really long time with both Acrobat 8 and 9. No I do not have multiple versions of reader nor Acrobat loaded. What is a point update? How do I get that? I am trying the "Repair Acrobat" off of the "Help" :-\ menu now. Why has this persisted for so long? Why is this program so outrageously expensive and yet it is half-baked? How did the associated notoriously slow pig Reader get so popular?

Now I have YET ANOTHER ACCOUNT to have to keep track of with it's special password requirements that are different than everyone elses special password requirements. Yay. Thanks.

Randy
rdc
Registered: Apr 8 2010
Posts: 19
Randy: Some incredibly long time later......still waits for the "Repair" to finish so he can get back to work......sigh.
rdc
Registered: Apr 8 2010
Posts: 19
Of course it is nearly impossible to do the edits he needs to do anyway because he cannot for the life of himself figure out how to turn the properties bar back on, even though it is selected that way under the Toolbars sub-menu and no amount of turning this on and off makes it return. sigh.

Oh, the Repair says "Time remaining 35 minutes" Are you fucking kidding me?

Randy
rdc
Registered: Apr 8 2010
Posts: 19
How shall I explain to my boss that I am sitting on my ass typing to a web page instead of doing my work? 19 minutes to go.
rdc
Registered: Apr 8 2010
Posts: 19
Now back to 36 minutes. I see that we are using the Microsuck model for our progress bar.
lkassuba
ExpertTeam
Registered: Jun 28 2007
Posts: 3636
You can download product updates [url=http://www.adobe.com/downloads/updates/]here[/url].

Lori Kassuba is an AUC Expert and Community Manager for AcrobatUsers.com.

rdc
Registered: Apr 8 2010
Posts: 19
Oh, I see, what you really meant is "What version are you running and/or are you running the latest patches?" Yes. I have 9.3.1 installed.
rdc
Registered: Apr 8 2010
Posts: 19
calguy248 wrote:
This is a longstanding known issue; it happens to me CONSTANTLY, using both Acrobat 8 Pro & Acrobat 9 Pro. Tech support is useless and refuses to acknowledge or solve this extremely annoying problem.I need to highlight text (using different opacities of highlighting) in a variety of PDFs: scanned-ClearScan OCR, ebooks, downloaded journal articles, etc. None of them are "restricted" in commenting, etc.

Within a few minutes of editing, when I go to highlight some text or change opacity, one of two things will happen spontaneously.

1) Properties bar disappears entirely when text selected (erroneously changes to "No current selection")
or
2) Properties bar suddenly greyed out when text selected

It is absolutely inconceivable that Adobe is unaware of this absurd defect -- and is unwilling or unable to fix such a simple functionality so that it works consistently and correctly!
So this truly is inconceivable.....none of the folks who started this chain (an the many others, I am sure) have seen a resolution to this. Is this OK with ADOBE?

I guess my seeming rage comes from the fact that I too have dealt with this pain in the ass issue for a couple years now and when I finally decide to investigate WTF, I find that ADOBE is well aware, but must not care.

Randy
lkassuba
ExpertTeam
Registered: Jun 28 2007
Posts: 3636
Have any of you tried to re-create the Acrobat Preferences folder:

1. Quit Acrobat.
2. In Windows Explorer, go to c:\Documents and Settings\ [User Name] \Application Data Adobe\Acrobat\8.0 folder and move the Preferences folder to another location (for example, C:\Temp).
3. Launch Acrobat.

Or, have you tried creating a new windows user account to see if you experience the same problem?

Lori Kassuba is an AUC Expert and Community Manager for AcrobatUsers.com.

hoyawildcat
Registered: Mar 22 2007
Posts: 42
Adobe ignoring you?

Adobe indifferent to your needs?

I'm shocked, shocked!!!!

Not to worry. Just wait a few years. It gets even worse.

Beware of the Evangelists: Adobe kool-aid is an hallucinogen that will lead you astray...

http://www.acrobatusers.com/forums/aucbb/viewtopic.php?id=25559
terri12345
Registered: Jun 8 2010
Posts: 1
I can't get the comments and markup toolbar to show anything other than Text Edits. All the boxes are checked under the Customize Toolbars/comment&markup toolbar. the documents security settings don't show that comments are not allowed. Help please
lkassuba
ExpertTeam
Registered: Jun 28 2007
Posts: 3636
terri12345 wrote:
I can't get the comments and markup toolbar to show anything other than Text Edits. All the boxes are checked under the Customize Toolbars/comment&markup toolbar. the documents security settings don't show that comments are not allowed. Help please
Try opening just one PDF and then clicking in an area that just has white space.

Lori Kassuba is an AUC Expert and Community Manager for AcrobatUsers.com.