Preview not working from Adobe Acrobat Pro 8.1.4 and other CS3 applications

Hello and welcome to Apple Discussions.

I think you will find this is a limitation of Acrobat. The Preview process basically converts the current document to a PDF and opens it in Preview. Since you are already viewing a PDF, what would be the point of making another PDF of a PDF?

I know you can do this in the Preview application, where from the Print dialog you can click the PDF button and select "Open PDF in Preview". But this basically makes a copy of the PDF, a print to file in Windows terminology. So, maybe Adobe just saves you the trouble of duplicating files.

Given that the Acrobat print dialog has a mini print preview, they may feel this is enough and have stopped the Preview button from working? Or maybe they don't want you using Preview to view the document you've opened in Acrobat? We may never find out...

PaHu

The OS X Preview function makes a PDF of the document. The issue here is that OS X uses a certain range of features in a certain version of PDF. There are two problems with that. One problem is that Adobe apps can do more than what OS X preview can show.

For example, if you are in Illustrator or InDesign, and you use its own Preview view mode with Proof Setup correctly configured, I'm pretty sure you'll get a more accurate rendition of objects and color inside Illustrator/InDesign than OS X could ever give you. Same with Photoshop - you have much more control over the profile and rendering intent in the Proof Setup/Proof Colors preview mode than you have with the OSX Preview button, which only gives you the one "Soft Proof" checkbox.

The other problem is that Apple tends to use an older version of PDF and a smaller range of features of it. OS X preview seems designed for previewing home/office-types of apps, but not high-end graphics apps. So if you wanted to see something like accurate separations print preview, you won't get that out of OS X, but you will get it as a standard feature in InDesign, Illustrator, Acrobat.

Adobe probably disabled OS X preview to avoid having the inferior OS X preview mislead people by feeding it features it can't handle.

The answer for you is to learn how to use the very powerful preview functions in the CS apps.