Help Please (Acrobat Pro 8 problems)

It sounds like you are having an extremely frustrating time. I can relate, as I have often run into these brick walls, though after years of working with Acrobat, I find I am liking it more and more (not that there isn't room for improvement).

As with most programs, as they evolve over time, they acquire more and more features. One possible source of some of your problems are the settings that control the characteristics of PDFs that you create. You can get a sense of the settings for a particular PDF by going to Advanced|Print Production|PDF Optimizer (you need to have a file open to get access to this menu item).

There are lots and lots of options to tweak here and it can be a little overwhelming. You might want to start with looking at the resolution setting for images as it sounds like pictures are causing some problems. You might also want to look at whether you are embedding all of the fonts used in your PDFs (which can make the files huge).

Another place to look for possible system resource drains is under Edit|Preferences, specifically under the option for converting to PDF. Which raises an important question, how are you creating your PDFs? Are you printing from within an application to the PDF printer, are you converting an existing file created in another application (e.g., Word, InDesign, etc.) from within Acrobat, or are you creating the PDF from a web page? You will find the settings for conversion from many foreign applications at Edit|Preferences|Convert to PDF.

You might also want to check the multimedia settings under the Edit|Preferences item, as you could inadvertantly be including lots of multimedia "stuff" in your PDF files. This stuff can slow things down.

There are lots of other settings that could be causing the probems you are experiencing, but instead of going through an exhautive list, I thought I'd start with the first ones that came to mind.

If these don't help, perhaps you can provide a little more info about the context of your pdf creation. How are you creating the pdfs that are giving you all the problems? How big are the pdf files? What kind of system are you working on (i.e., how much memory, how fast is the processor, how much hard disk space)? What other applications do you have open at the time when these problems are occuring? Do you have any local security applications running (e.g. software firewall, antivirus, etc.)? If so, which ones?

Finally, if you want to send me a sample file that is consistently causing you problems, I'd be happy to load it up on one of my systems and give it a quick look-see. If you'd like me to look at a file, send me an email (by clicking on the email link next to my post and give me your address, I will then respond with my email so you can send the file.)

---Andrew

Hi Konsta,

Thanks for your response and email..........After calling Adobe Acrobat customer support, and not getting any help from them that solved my noted problems, I took it upon myself to figure out why I constantly had problems with Acrobat 8 Pro freezing up.

And I found out what the problem is........the problem lies within another Adobe product that I use to create my jpeg file with......Photoshop Elements 5.

Here's what was causing my problems.

Whenever I'm creating a JPEG file in Adobe Photoshop, such as picture, or a diagram that I have drawn within Photoshop, I then go through the standard process of saving the file by using: File > Save As > Format Option as JPEG.....type file name.....etc.Then, within Photoshop, while saving a file as a jpeg, a JPEG OPTIONS box opens, where you have a choice of selecting (Image Option Resolutions) & (Format Options)............the problem/conflict with Acrobat-8 occurs with the "Format Option" that you choose here at this point in saving a jpeg file.You have three choices to pick from under “Format Option”, either: Baseline Standard (or) Baseline Optimized (or) Progressive.

Unless you select the format option of "Progressive" while saving as a JPEG file in Photoshop Elements-5, you will have a problem if you attempt to include the new JPEG file as a file in a PDF Package created in Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional.

If you selected either Baseline Standard (or) Baseline Optimized while saving a jpeg file in Photoshop, when you include the jpeg file in a PDF package created in Acrobat-8, upon attempting to view this JPEG file in the PDF package, it will freeze your screen in Acrobat-8, and most times require a Control-Alt-Delete to get out of Acrobat-8. Sometimes it “unfreezes”, if you want to wait up to five minutes before being able to continue.

Therefore it’s my experience that if I save all newly created JPEG files in Photoshop Elements-5 with the “Progressive” option, and then include this JPEG file in a PDF Package created in Acrobat-8 Pro, the JPEG file will not cause Acrobat-8 Pro to freeze-up.

It took a long time for me to figure out this solution, one that I thought the Pros at Adobe Customer Support should have been able to tell me about, to no avail.

If someone else is experiencing the same problem, hope my efforts can help them.


Robert
05/17/07 at 1:40pm PST

Hello all,

Please don't use adobe acrobat 8 professional.

It hangs and freezes all the time. I always update the versions, but it still happens. Even, when I uninstall it, it's stucked and now I can not run it or uninstall it while the files (700MB) of garbage are still in my computer.

Adobe acrobat 8 professional is rubbish product!

Slow scrolling and painting issues may also be due to incompatible graphic processing units. For more information check out the tech note [url=http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/405/kb405218.php]2D Graphics Acceleration (GPU) support in Acrobat and Adobe Reader (9.0 on Windows)[/url].