how do you remove the purple instruction bar?

Hi ST,

When you change settings under "Edit Preferences" you are only changing those features for Acrobat on your system, not settings for individual PDF files viewed by others ( they can change Acrobat for thier own wants/needs too).

There is nothing you can do to get rid of the famously disliked "purple bar," and you are one of a large crowd who would like to do so.

Hope this helps,

Dimitri
WindJack Solutions
www.windjack.com
www.pdfscripting.com

Thanks Dimitri.

I now see that if I had done a general search for "purple bar," I would have
found that my question has come up a couple of times over the past few years.
I didn't know that the "purple bar" has this kind of reputation in the Acrobat world...

Sheldon

Although people in the Acrobat world complain, the "purple bar" is there and permanently-there for a very good reason - the vast majority of folks receiving a PDF form for the first time have no clue what it is or what to do with it (and tended to print the thing out and post it). The hint bar is there to tell naive users that (a) they're looking at a dynamic form, and (b)they can fill in certain boxes, which the bar will show them, but not necessarily all the boxes on the page. Without the bar, you'd have to know to try clicking in boxes to see if you'd got a form or not.

Remember the "hint" messages are not really supposed to be for folks like us that use Acrobat every day, but for someone who probably doesn't even know what "PDF" stands for, and so it defeats the object if the document creator can disable them. Users who don't like the bar can turn it off on their own computer, but you can't assume everyone who opens a form will realize what they're looking at without that hint, and the purple bar is less intrusive than a popup, as it doesn't steal focus.

Hi UVSAR,

Point taken, but don't you think the document author- who obstensibly knows his/her audience, should have the choice to show that message or not? It should not be forced in situations where it is not needed nor wanted- hence the various posts asking to remove it. Assuming that all form recipient audiences are ignorant from the get-go is a strange way of being helpful.

Just my two cents.

Hope this helps,

Dimitri
WindJack Solutions
www.windjack.com
www.pdfscripting.com

In a closed distribution you could know everyone is aware of the form without the hint bar, but the counter-argument is that the GUI is the readers' "property", and we're just supplying a document. If they want (or don't want) a particular GUI element, they can change their preferences. We already have the ability to hide the screen furniture, but the user can countermand the document - if we got a toggle for the hint bar, Acrobat and Reader would need another prefs checkbox to let users who always wanted to see it block our document's attempts to hide it (or a popup question like we get with full-screen mode, which would be more annoying than the bar).

Defaulting the GUI to first-time users is the Adobe way - it's why CS4 apps open in Essentials workspace - as those are the folks least likely to want to go near the preferences panels.

Hi UVSAR,

Good points again. However, there are many cases where developers create PDF documents which incorporate form fields but are in fact NOT fillable forms. Telling viewers it is a fillable form when in fact it is not could be a bit confusing as well. Just another example of why there are people asking to have the choice to show or not show the "purple bar."

Hope this helps,

Dimitri
WindJack Solutions
www.pdfscripting.com
www.windjack.com

Here's another plea for some kind of control over controlling the display of the purple user baffler bar.

At the risk of wasting some keystrokes, let me make my case for allowing developers to control this aspect of the user experience.

I work for a web-based software-as-service medical records company. Our users are nurses, social workers, and other medical professionals. Many of them don't know the difference between WTF and PDF, and rightly don't care.

We offer several hundred different Acrobat facsimiles of various state and federal government mandated health care forms, via a web service. We create dozens a month of these forms, using duly licensed copies, right now, of Acrobat Pro version 8.

When the user needs a particular form, we serve it up, the user fills it out, and then posts it (via a "save my work" button embedded in the form) in fdf form. Our web app stashes the form fields in a data base. Some of these forms are big (the Virginia state Medicaid eligibility form is 21 pages long, sheesh) so they take a significant amount of user labor to fill out. Those forms have "save and continue" buttons on them.

When Reader 9 came out, the purple baffler bar started appearing right above our Save My Work button, "You cannot save data typed into this form." Actually, the bar was there in Acrobat 8 as well, but didn't contain the "cannot save" warning. Recently, the various Adobe Reader hacks and exploits caused some hospital IT people to mass-upgrade their workstations to the latest and greatest reader, so this change happens for everybody at once in an institution.

So, now these users are presented with this contradictory information -- "cannot save" / "Save" right when they start on an hour-long bureaucratic form-filling task. The contradictory information basically informs them that they are about to waste their time. Sooo.... they call tech support at our company and say some polite version of "WTF? PDF? WTF?" Our support agents say "click the icon and hide the bar, pay no attention to it."

I HATE wasting the time of health care professionals; my company is in business to save them time. That's why we automate all these forms for them. It's also costly to take support calls.

If there were a URL option to conceal the purple bar on a case by case basis, that would be just great. Somebody you love might even get better health care because their nurse was spending time with them instead of wondering whether their form app was broken.

Please consider fixing it. If anybody knows of any other way to beat this problem, that would be helpful as well. (Would using LiveCycle help?) Thanks for reading.

Hi OliverJones,

Since you know who all the end users (your customers) are in this case you can provide them with instructions on how to change the preferences in Acrobat or Adobe Reader so the purple bar will not show up. Not too much of a hassle since it only has to be done once on every machine used to fill out your forms. If you can't do that then unfortunately you are stuck with the prevailing attitude that users are presumed stupid until proven intelligent....

Hope this helps,

Dimitri
WindJack Solutions
www.pdfscripting.com
www.windjack.com

Oliver - I do understand your problem, and agree that both the info bars (purple for forms, yellow for JavaScript) are not actually intended for your type of document or user base; but ultimately the ethos behind everything Adobe (and not just Adobe) is that the power to hide *any* type of message that warns the user about something has to remain with the user. If the document had control, I guarantee within a week it would be exploited for something.

Reader is aimed at everyone, which means 99% of users are complete novices. The warnings in "pro" applications, such as the CS5 suite, are far less intrusive as we can safely assume anyone using InDesign/Photoshop/Flash knows enough about computers to recognize a dinky little yellow triangle icon as in need of a good clicking. Reader users, with all respect due to them, are assumed, on average, to need a big purple bar.

Oliver is 100% right. The purple bar is example of extremely poor design (hello Adobe programmers...).

Here is an example of better alternative (KISS - aka "keep it simple stupid"):
When application needs to alert user of something, one should simply use message box. Once message is read, one can click on OK button and move along. With purple bar, there is no clear bail out option. Yes one can click on a right spot to hide it but who the heck knows that is what one is supposed to click on? And how the hell do you bring it back? Clearly they didn't think it through...

Any more reason why purple bar so bad? Most displays have horrible vertical resolution (less than 1000 pixels vertically). More over the high resolution such as 1920x1200 is next to impossible to find, at least on 15" laptops (it's been pretty much replaced by 1920x1080). For whatever reason, software designers are largely unaware of this, they keep pushing bulky bars as new standard. Perhaps they should be forced to develop on 1280x768 or 1366x768 screens, I can't think of any better way to force them to think about usability. Putting fat ribbon bars (MS Office) or adding another purple bar (Adobe Acrobat) and eating away this precious display space is a crime, especially when there is nothing to edit. The offending purple bar would show up on most PDFs I only wanted to read. Can't the stupid message be shown when you try to save (and only IF you try to save) instead of every damn document with a bit of interactivity? That would just make too much sense for purple programmer(s). I am looking for a way to fit tool bar next to menu to save every pixel (and I am using Dell M4300 with 1920x1200). I pay $$$ for every pixel only to see some purple programmer squandering it away. I can't understand how others manage to get by on budget devices with resolution as low as 1366x768 (or lower). Shame on purple programmers...

Once can use full screen view to hide purple bar too (like all other bars). Fortunately purple programmers eventually learned to use ESC key to bail out of full screen mode. They even added context menu (opens to right click) so one has more than one way to bail out from full screen display. Unfortunately full screen only shows single page view, so it is completely useless to browse user manuals and datasheets where tables and circuit diagrams are spread across two facing pages - which is where full screen would have been most useful. (I wonder how long it takes for purple programmers to figure this one out...)

@ ibyk30

I don't see a problem in hiding the purple bar.
Just click on the associated icon in the left pane (Navigation Pane).
The bar then is hidden and Acrobat/Reader remembers this as long I click the button eventually again.
As simple as clicking a messagebox away, isn't it?