FM8 and Acrobat Pro 9

[Dov Isaacs]

Although Adobe's installers do not prevent Reader and Acrobat from
being installed in parallel, I MOST STRONGLY RECOMMEND AGAINST
such installations. Unless you are very technically sophisticated,
you are likely not to get the "desired results" when trying to
maintain such an installation.

Furthermore, I contend that the commonly-expressed reason for trying
to have such installations does not conform to good engineering or
QA discipline. The idea of having a copy of Reader to "see what a
typical user will see when opening up a PDF file" really requires
that you have Reader installed on a bare-bones system - actually
a non-particularly well-endowed (in terms of CPU speed, memory,
disk, and screen size) system with only the officially-installed
Windows system fonts. For such testing, you would be much better
off with an old, slow system with the simplest OS install, possibly
multiple OS versions and Reader versions in separate partitions and/or
running under VMWare.

        - Dov

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Art Campbell
> Sent: Friday, June 06, 2008 7:07 AM
>
> Or before you do that, you may want to clarify and question Mike's
> opinion on version compatibility, which I think is different than
> Adobe's.
>
> Mike's take is that Acrobat and Reader interact in some way that can
> cause problems. And I disagree. As far as I know, Adobe has always
> recommended that only one version of Acrobat be installed on a system.
> This is the key point. Acrobat requirements do not equate to Reader
> requirements.
>
> Reader is a separate product that doesn't conflict or inter-operate
> with Acrobat binaries. It's common practice to have a couple versions
> of Reader installed on a box so that you can test your PDFs with
> multiple versions. I've run multiple copies of Reader on a number of
> systems and it hasn't produced any errors or crashes that I'm aware
> of. As far as I know, Reader installations don't remove previous
> versions of Reader unless a known conflict exists, and don't touch
> Acrobat installations at all.
>
> Cheers,
> Art
>
>
> On Fri, Jun 6, 2008 at 8:32 AM, Peter Gold <peter at knowhowpro.com> wrote:
> > Hi, Austin:
> >
> > You can enter a formal request at
> >
> > http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=wishform
> >
> > You might want to request that the installer test for and report the
> > presence of conflicting Acrobat installations.
> >
> > On Fri, Jun 6, 2008 at 3:55 AM, Austin Meredith
> > <Ashley_Meredith at brown.edu> wrote:
> >> Dov, I'm wondering if you should alert Adobe to revise their
> >> installation instructions for Adobe Acrobat: that they should include
> >> as an initial step in their instructions, the purging of the Adobe
> >> Reader from the user's machine.
> >
> > Regards,
> >
> > Peter
> > __________________
> > Peter Gold