Slashdot Mirror
Adobe Acrobat Toolbar Worse than Malware?
Phr3n3tik writes "Adobe Acrobat has long included a toolbar plugin to automate PDF Making from Office Products. Those who found the toolbar an eyesore, or just used it infrequently could always hide it from view. Not so in their new versions, (6, and 7 apparently.) Their new take on the PDFMaker toolbar is getting some users riled up, since it is harder to Move/Hide/Delete/Uninstall this new toolbar than many forms of malware!"
I haven't used Acrobat 4 for quite a long time. However I cannot find a way to remove the PDF toolbar even after I have removed the software completely from my machine.
It is dangerous to be right on a subject on which the established authorities are wrong. - Voltaire
I mean geez I try not to bitch about the dupes and crappy stories that get posted here, but man is this a non-story.
t or/
btw a good free pdf creatore for windows.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcrea
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
I can remove the toolbar (Acobat Pro 6) from all the office products I just tried (only word and excel). The first link in this story is something about Visio, which is an add-on to office i think. I don't have that product, so I can't say. The other post is for office for mac osX, so I can't say there either. But the problem doesn't seem to be as big as the write-up suggests, surprised?
Instructions
Worked for me!
My userid is prime!
I refuse to use anything newer than version 5 of Acrobat. They completely and totally fucked up the product after this release.
Isn't it as simple as right-clicking the toolbar area and unchecking PDFmaker? I did this in about 2 seconds and it's gone.
Its annoying in Word 2004 for Mac.. always there in the toolbar. Also, its shit becuase if you've got Acrobat 7 installed, any pdf's you view in Safari have to open Acrobat first, no matter how many times you tell it to 'always open with preview'. Bugger.
Adobe seems to have partnered with Yahoo! to get Adobe Reader users to install the Yahoo! toolbar. When you go to adobe.com to download Adobe Reader, they try to bundle a lot of other junk with it as well (Yahoo! toolbar, Adobe Download Manager, etc.) It's getting really annoying.
I hate the way Acrobat loads in my browser window when I click a link to a PDF file, instead of simply opening Acrobat outside of my browser window. I end up with half the screen taken up by toolbars. It's ridiculous.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
On OS-X, at least, it installs itself automatically when doing an Acrobat Reader installation. I had to manually uninstall it from the Internet Plug-ins folder in order to use the significantly faster Schubert PDF Browser Plugin .
i thought, therefore i was...
lol. OpenOffice also can export to PDF without Acrobat present.. I'm sure most people don't know that, else why do they buy Acrobat?
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
Perhaps that's because, for obvious security reasons, I deactivated macros in MS word?
I wouldn't mess with it anyway. You can use Ghostscript. And you can used the modified primo pdf from active pdf. it's a free PDF creator.
http://www.primopdf.com
works great. one time it will ask you for personal info after you make like 25 pdfs, but you can just push the cancel button if you don't want to give them any statistical information. It appears as a printer on your computer. I use it, it's great.
...::----::...
I am in no way affiliated with this sig.
Rather than pay $100 for acrobat on your $900 computer spend $2000 on a mac and do it for free. That is a good idea.
;)
To be fair, the Mac Mini doesn't even come close to $2000. Still more expensive than Acrobat though.
Search your hard drive for "PDFMaker.dot" or probably anything else withe PDFMaker in the name. On my machine it installs it here:
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE11\STARTUP
That will get rid of it in all your Office apps including Outlook.
version 5 doesn't work with MS Office 2003 at all. My office installed 2003 last week & now, every time I open Word, I get an error message that says Acrobat 5 is incompatible & i have the choice to either go buy an upgrade or disable Acrobat while using Word. So sticking with 5 is fine, as long as you don't upgrade anything else either.
Uncheck this:
Edit>Preferences>Startup>Show Messages and automatically update
The banner goes away, and, as a bonus, if you have auto-update disabled, the stupid app stops tickling the network too.
C'mon gentlemen, this is not worth a slashdot article. Next time start your engines before flooring the pedal.
For those that don't know... it's a windows printer driver that makes PDFs of your document when you print to it... very handy.
Puh-leaze. Instead of spending money on Apple's overpriced wares, just use one of the many free alternatives, available on all of your favorite platforms.
I actually would not mind this toolbar being there. I even used it occasionally. But this thing does not behave like all the other tool bars. Turn it off or move it, restart program and Bam, there it is right back on the top row of toolbars pushing all the others down one line and reducing my view of the document.
It is a very annoying POS, so I just uninstalled it.
http://www.adobe.com/support/techdocs/328399.html
For Mac:
http://www.adobe.com/support/techdocs/329307.html
Annoying, but at least they show you how to get around the reappear/reinstall/undeletable garbage the toolbar usually subjects you to.
Apple-P -> Save as PDF :)
http://www.schubert-it.com/pluginpdf/
This software is similar to my previous post:
a sp
another free replacement for your toolbar.
http://www.cutepdf.com/products/cutepdf/Writer.
...::----::...
I am in no way affiliated with this sig.
(posting anonymously to save my ass)
This article is 100% bullshit.
If you actually search the support documents, you can find instructions for removing PDFMaker. Or, if you're doing a first-time installation, you can just do a custom installation and *gasp* tell it not to install PDFMaker to begin with!
What made version 6.0 and 7.0 annoying is the "self-heal" feature that would put the PDFMaker files back after you deleted them. However, if you use the custom install approach, the self-heal will not put PDFmaker back.
Trivia: I personally have spoken with people who either want PDFMaker gone or want it back. The latter grossly outnumber the former.
Of course I don't need it so much now that I've switched to OpenOffice anyway.
Acrobat is used extensively in commercial prepress print publishing workflows that use PostScript.
That's essentially every newspaper and magazine with a circulation of 40,000 and up.
And most of those publications use Macs for the final pagination & printing, yet still purchase Acrobat for the fine-tuning features of Distiller.
Also, Acrobat allows you to set document security attributes that OpenOffice.org's "Export to PDF" and Mac OS X's native "Save as PDF" don't support.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
OS X's built-in PDF maker sucks. It doesn't do any optimization at all, so anything with graphics turns out huge.
For full control of *all* PDF settings, it's best to make a postscript file and then use Distiller to crank out a PDF. It's not a free solution, but it's the best thing out there.
Transistors and Beer!!
Recent versions of Acrobat reader and writer which have come with other Adobe products and which I use for testing are really annoying. They hook into Word. They hook into Safari. They integrate with numerous apps by adding buttons and toolbars. It is really bothersome. On OS X, why do I need an extra button in Word That tries to sell me Acrobat Writer. It's not like Word on OS X can't already make PDFs. Also, Acrobat reader is much slower than Preview and grinds the browser to a halt while trying to open PDFs inline. That is half the reason PDFs suck so badly on Windows. Worse yet, recent version of reader on OS X silently fail to open some PDFs. Adobe needs to get their act together.
ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/reader/unix/7x/7.0/e nu/ for a clickable link! :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Prior to Acrobat 6, if you said not to install PDFMaker, it didn't. Starting with 6, it does it anyway. However, we've found that simply deleting the templates placed in the Office startup folders is enough to remove the integration and toolbars.
The program installs things you specifically exclude. That is bad. The effect on end users is somewhere between confusing and aggravating. But at a support level, we've had very good luck removing the templates before creating workstation images, and we've been able to mostly avoid the problems as a result.
http://drteknikal.blogspot.com/
PDFCreator easily creates PDFs from any Windows program. Use it like a printer in Word, StarCalc or any other Windows application.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/
Works like a charm.
Yes the visio version of the bar is right PITA.
The toolbars are dead easy to remove.
OT, but I have to say this. Excel has problems. I hate the reviewing toolbar. I just don't use it. It takes up valuable real estate. Whenever I open up a .xls that was saved by somebody who had the reviewing toolbar turned on (which is 98% of the rest of the world), the toolbar appears again, completely overriding my settings until I turn the toolbar off again. Fricking POS.
You don't. Go install QuickTime Alternative instead.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
You are wrong though. There are no .dot files with acrobat7.
How can you delete the file, when it isn't there?
-------------------- Hmmm... what does this button d
The PDF toolbar V6 can be hidden by right clicking on a toolbar and unselecting PDFMAker from the list of toolbars. The same way as every other toolbar in Office. What's the fuss about?
I suspect the problem is more with people...
An incredibly intellingent person, not to mention handsome and very very rich