Multiple versions of Acrobat on same system?

[Dov Isaacs]

Although (very unfortunately), it is PHYSICALLY possible to
have multiple versions of Adobe Acrobat concurrently installed,
concurrent versions of Adobe Reader concurrently installed, or
some combination of versions of both Acrobat and Reader installed,
the truth is that the architecture of these programs and the
underlying operating system services used by same really only
fully supports installation of only one version of EITHER Adobe
Acrobat or Adobe Reader on one system at one time.

I am sure we will get the inevitable responses from members of
this list that boast about how they have multiple versions and/or
mixtures of Acrobat and Reader concurrently installed and somehow
get some or most of the functionality to work for them. On the
other hand, there are a tremendous number of problems reported to
Adobe that are suddenly cleared up when the user's systems are
scraped of all concurrent versions of Acrobat and Reader, replaced
by a single version of one or another. (Note that by "Acrobat" I
mean any and all pieces of it including the Distiller, the AdobePDF
PostScript printer driver instance, and the viewing program!)

But, some list members will complain, how do I know what the 
recipients of my PDF file will see on their systems if I also
don't have a copy of Reader installed, or perhaps multiple versions
of Reader and Acrobat installed? The response to that is to have
test systems (or separate test partitions of your one system) that
have minimal software installations (especially fonts) and a copy
of the target version of Adobe Reader. That is the only way to 
truly simulate the user experience. For that matter, old, slower
systems are even more appropriate!

	- Dov

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Diane Gaskill
> Sent: Sunday, August 05, 2007 12:43 PM
> 
> I've read several discussions on this list about multiple versions of
FM
> runing on the same system (it works).  Can multiple versions of
Acrobat also
> run on the same system?  I recently installed Acrobat 7 on my system
(XP2)
> but did not uninstall Acrobat 5.  Acrobat 5 now displays an error
message
> and closes.
> 
> From the messages below, it sounds like the answer is no for
Distiller, but
> what about Acrobat itself?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Diane
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dov Isaacs
> 
> If you let FrameMaker's install perform the installation of
> the stand-alone Distiller, make absolutely sure you UNINSTALL
> that version of Distiller and reboot before attempting to
> install any version of Acrobat!
> 
> 	- Dov