Newsroom Update
Beginning in May, a special Today at Apple series titled “Made for Business” will offer small business owners and entrepreneurs free opportunities to learn how Apple products and services can support their growth and success. Learn more >
Beginning in May, a special Today at Apple series titled “Made for Business” will offer small business owners and entrepreneurs free opportunities to learn how Apple products and services can support their growth and success. Learn more >
For many years of using OS X server in our district, we have never been able to use Adobe Acrobat Reader. Opening the software just makes it unexpectedly quit. I was hoping upgrading to 10.8 server would fix this problem, but it hasn't. Has anyone had any experience getting Adobe Acrobat Reader to work? We have some software that requires Adobe Acrobat to interact with many .pdf files.
Thanks,
Bryan
Bryan,
could you clarify the problem a little bit? You are trying to open adobe reader on the server itself?
Or the server has clients of some kind and they can't open Reader? How are they clients - Open Directory, NetBoot, ?
chic
Our school has about 400 Mac computers running OS 10.5 to 10.8. We are in an open directory environment. When users try to open Adobe Acrobat on their workstation, the application will open, and then immediately unexpectedly quit. I created a test group to allow any and all programs, but the problem persists. This has been happening since we were on a 10.2 server. Preview works perfectly to open .pdf documents, but there are a few applications that require Adobe acrobat to open a master .pdf document to open links to other adobe acrobat documents that do not work in preview.
Thanks,
Bryan
It is possible the problem is Acrobat Reader not working with network home directories. It is a long time since I looked in to this but I think around about Acrobat Reader 9 Adobe broke the ability to use Reader with network home directories. This bug was originally introduced with Acrobat Pro 7 (but not Reader), fixed in Acrobat Pro 8.1, reintroduced in Acrobat Pro 9 (and Reader 9) and may still exist.
See http://www.macsmarts.com/acrobat-reader-crashes-with-network-home-folder-account s-on-os-x/
The fix for Acrobat Pro and apparently also Acrobat Reader is to redirect a folder to a location on your local harddisk instead of the (in this case) normal location in your network home directory on the server. See the above article.
Note: With Snow Leopard Server you can automate this redirection.
Unfortunately Adobe are completely brain dead regarding ensuring their applications work properly with network home directories. Their attitude is that they do not support using their software with servers (literally that is what they said).
These days Preview at least in Lion and later is able to do almost anything your average user needs with PDFs including deleting or adding pages, adding notes, even producing password protected PDFs.
PS. Even Microsoft who are notorious for their poor Mac programming do a better job than Adobe with regards to working with network home directories.
The problem is pretty much what John Lockwood talked about in his post. There is a directory that Acrobat is unable to read/write to when it resides in a network home directory.
The fix is to create a symlink to a local directory (I create a folder at /Users/Shared/RedirectData for this purpose).
mkdir -p /Users/Shared/RedirectData/Acrobat/10.0 mkdir -p ~/Library/Application\ Support/Adobe/Acrobat ln -s /Users/Shared/RedirectData/Acrobat/10.0 ~/Library/Application\ Support/Adobe/Acrobat"Quit unexpectedly" happened to me also on my iMac running 10.8.5. I repaired permissions with Disk Utility and then Adobe Reader behaved itself. In the meanwhile, I had used Acrobat, which behaved normally.
Adobe Acrobat and Workstations...