Others say...

"Adobe Acrobat and MS Office Integration Nightmare"
I agree with the majority of reviewers regarding this product's overly intrusive grip on MS Office applications. It is just horrible.

Unfortunately, renaming the PDFMaker subdirectory doesn't work if you are using the MS Office Suite of applications, because Adobe Acrobat is self-reparing. Next time you try to exercise anything related to Adobe Acrobat while using an MS Office app, Adobe Acrobat will self-repair itself by re-creating the PDFMaker directory!

The only way to totally disable AdobeAcrobat integration with the MS Office products is to hack into the Windows registry and delete its hooks that it uses to register itself into the MS Office suite of installed applications. It's dangerous to do that, and I don't want to risk damaging my work PC. To do it safely, just keep messing with the preferences/options in the MS Office apps, until you manage to tame the acrobatic beast.

"Wow, did I get the wrong product?"
I came to Amazon to window shop OCR options for my OpticBook 3600 Book Scanner (great device if you do a lot of book or magazine scanning. It's stopped killing the spines on my books and has two passable but not great OCR tools OEMed in the box) and thought it interesting that Acrobat came up in my search.

What a surprise to read all the angry reviews! Makes me think I'm on a different planet.

I bought this as an upgrade from 5 back when it first came out. Been running it since a load of times (gotta be at least a hundred by now), grabbing linked web pages by just telling it the main url (works where IE's *.mhts no longer will), and of course have been using it directly in Word (XP and 2003) to create eBooks.

I never really was a huge fan of the OCR but considered that a bonus feature, not a primary one.

For everything else it's worked like a champ in my experience.

Unlike the offerings when I bought mine, there are now a lot of other tools out there that create PDF format files so if you don't want or need the extra features of Pro (like Forms and web link following) then try those out, hey $400 is a big investment and you should look around for somethng more modest if you don't need all that Acrobat Pro includes or if the money is going to mean less food on the table for a while.

For me it's been a very good tool.


"Warning 20225 Converter Error: Adobe PDF Converter & Adobe PDF Printer"
I am furious. I have just upgraded from Adobe CS to Adobe CS2 which gives me Adobe Professional V7 (replaces my prior Adobe Professional V6) and now I can no longer print to ADOBE PDF from my Microsoft Word and the Adobe Professional V7 would not install the PDF Converteror PDF Printer.

I get Warning 20225 ADOBE PDF Converter error when I installed V7 from the CS2 diskettes.

I've searched the error message and it appears that is a known problem and it also appears there is no real resolution to the problem.

So, I decided to reinstall Adobe Professional V6 (and have both V6 and V7 installed and use V6 when converting word documents to my ADOBE PDF printer which is what I used before) and it will not allow me to re-install V6 saying I have an upgraded version already installed.

I suppose I could uninstall Adobe Professional V7 now and then re-install V6 (using it instead), but not sure if that would cause me a problem with other products in the CS2 Bundle (which may expect Adobe Profession V7 to be installed).

This is bizzare! Why in the world would Adobe put out a supposedly advanced product with more features and eliminate one of the highly used ones - saving a Microsoft Word document to Adobe PDF Printer???

Suggestions or help would be greatly appreciated.

"Mac owners-forget using Designer"
I agree with much of what has already been written. Acrobat's "conveniences" can be intrusive. But accusations of "bloated" and "overpriced" are a little unfair; it might be one or the other, but it can hardly be both. Any $500 program is going to seem bloated to those who don't need its functionality. If you are buying the Professional edition, do expect a LOT of features you'll never use, and quite a few you'll never even know exist.

That said, I find it distressing to be the owner of a program that ships by the same name and with the same price as its Windows counterpart, but includes nothing of the new Adobe Designer, the separate form design program. While Adobe may have its internal technical reasons for the delay in porting to the Mac, it's something of a slap in the face to their Mac base, which has wholeheartedly embraced the Creative Suite (and helped make it the Quark-killer that Adobe prophesied). It doesn't help that nowhere that I can find does Adobe explain why. Nor have I seen any word on when (or even if) Designer will go Mac. Professional users can be forgiven for expecting at least that much.

As of this writing, forms created in Designer cannot be edited in Acrobat 7 Pro. This is goofy logic for a program that was supposed to bring everything in the PDF environment together in one (quite expensive) application.

I love what I got in Acrobat, but I didn't get the same program Windows users enjoy...and Adobe should have made that clear. Even more, Adobe should have let their pricing reflect that fact.

"How to fix the Acrobat integration mess"
The other reviewers are right -- Acrobat has gone to ridiculous extremes with their "integration" efforts, made far worse by the decision to make it effectively impossible to control the unwanted "Acrobat Everywhere" intrusion.

Fortunately, I have found an extremely easy way to remedy the problem: rename the directory where all of the integration files are installed. I'm posting the instructions here since I found these reviews after doing a Google search looking for a way to disable the integration, so hopefully others in the same predicament will find their way here.

Under C:\Program Files, open the Adobe directory, then open the Acrobat directory. You should see a folder named PDFMaker. Rename it (I chose something obvious, like disablePDFMaker.)

Viola. Upon restarting Outlook, Word, or other affected applications, the Office app won't be able to locate the DLLs and other Acrobat files, and will simply ignore the integrated components. (For the technically minded, these are COM DLLs, so I guess you could unregister them, but I was in a hurry, this works, and it's a lot easier to explain to the average Amazon user.)

It's sad, too -- PDFs are a great idea, and Acrobat itself is a powerful tool, but Adobe just seems to have lost all grip on reality when it comes to estimating the importance of Acrobat in the average user's daily routine.