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New Participant
July 1, 2015
Answered

How to enable scroll bar?

  • July 1, 2015
  • 21 replies
  • 117317 views

Acrobat Reader 11 (XI) : No scroll bar on the right, and I cannot find the option in "preferences" to enable it. Annoying to have to "grab and pull up" all the time. How do I enable it?

Thanks.

Correct answer Amal.

Hi All

 

The issue has been addressed with the new version of Acrobat (23.08.20555) and now we have a preference to enable the scroll bar in Mac.
Please find details for the fix here:- https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/scroll-framework-upgrade-macos.html

 

~Amal

21 replies

Amal.
Community Manager
Amal.Community ManagerCorrect answer
Community Manager
February 28, 2024

Hi All

 

The issue has been addressed with the new version of Acrobat (23.08.20555) and now we have a preference to enable the scroll bar in Mac.
Please find details for the fix here:- https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/scroll-framework-upgrade-macos.html

 

~Amal

Participating Frequently
November 17, 2023

I couldn't figure out how to enable a scroll bar always showing up in the most current version of Acrobat. One can install an older version of the software. Or if you're a Mac user and use Time Machine, you can launch an older version of Acrobat from your Time Machine backups and make the older version a default app for PDF files. It's not ideal, but it's a temporary solution for me.

New Participant
November 21, 2023

Yes, it works, but make sure that you disable Acrobat Reader in the Login Items (Settings / General / Login Items). Otherwise, after one or two days the scroll bar will be gone again.

Participating Frequently
November 21, 2023

Yep, it works. I've just Time Machined back to Feb this year and restored Acrobat. Both scrolls are back.

Adobe... you should be ashamed.

 

New Participant
October 31, 2023

As someone who has to make changes via a ton of comments posted in the pdf document, having to 'trick' Acrobat into letting me access the scroll bar, both on the document side and then on the comments side, this is beyond frustrating!!
Seems like lately, 'updates' are made for the sake of making updates,  based way more on appearance purposes rather than benefitting the people who have to spend their entire days working with this crap.
Quit breaking stuff that wasn't broken!

tanzblume
Known Participant
November 17, 2023

I have a workaround for the moment. It seems to be there is no possibility to show scroll bars always.

My settings are.

mac OS: Scroll bars = always

Acrobat: Touchscreen mode = never

If scroll bars are disappeared and I need them I do following.
1. Hide Acrobat by pressing [OPTION] and click with mouse on FINDER

2. Bring back Acrobat with [COMMAND] [TAB]

Hope it help til Adobe brings an Update for this problem.

Participating Frequently
November 17, 2023

Yeah, done all that. 

If Adobe built nuclear power stations we would all be dead. 

 

 

Participating Frequently
October 30, 2023

BRING BACK THE SCROLL BAR. BRING BACK THE SCROLL BAR. BRING BACK THE SCROLL BAR. BRING BACK THE SCROLL BAR. BRING BACK THE SCROLL BAR. BRING BACK THE SCROLL BAR. BRING BACK THE SCROLL BAR. BRING BACK THE SCROLL BAR. BRING BACK THE SCROLL BAR. BRING BACK THE SCROLL BAR. BRING BACK THE SCROLL BAR. BRING BACK THE SCROLL BAR. BRING BACK THE SCROLL BAR. BRING BACK THE SCROLL BAR. BRING BACK THE SCROLL BAR. BRING BACK THE SCROLL BAR. BRING BACK THE SCROLL BAR. BRING BACK THE SCROLL BAR. BRING BACK THE SCROLL BAR. BRING BACK THE SCROLL BAR. BRING BACK THE SCROLL BAR. BRING BACK THE SCROLL BAR. BRING BACK THE SCROLL BAR. BRING BACK THE SCROLL BAR. BRING BACK THE SCROLL BAR. BRING BACK THE SCROLL BAR. BRING BACK THE SCROLL BAR. BRING BACK THE SCROLL BAR. BRING BACK THE SCROLL BAR. BRING BACK THE SCROLL BAR. BRING BACK THE SCROLL BAR. BRING BACK THE SCROLL BAR. BRING BACK THE SCROLL BAR. BRING BACK THE SCROLL BAR. BRING BACK THE SCROLL BAR. BRING BACK THE SCROLL BAR. BRING BACK THE SCROLL BAR. BRING BACK THE SCROLL BAR. BRING BACK THE SCROLL BAR. BRING BACK THE SCROLL BAR. BRING BACK THE SCROLL BAR. BRING BACK THE SCROLL BAR. BRING BACK THE SCROLL BAR. BRING BACK THE SCROLL BAR. BRING BACK THE SCROLL BAR. BRING BACK THE SCROLL BAR. BRING BACK THE SCROLL BAR. BRING BACK THE SCROLL BAR. BRING BACK THE SCROLL BAR. BRING BACK THE SCROLL BAR. BRING BACK THE SCROLL BAR. BRING BACK THE SCROLL BAR. BRING BACK THE SCROLL BAR. BRING BACK THE SCROLL BAR. BRING BACK THE SCROLL BAR. BRING BACK THE SCROLL BAR. BRING BACK THE SCROLL BAR. 

New Participant
October 18, 2023

Absolutely cannot get work done without the ALWAYS VISIBLE SCROLL BAR. I feel like I'm struggling all day long to complete any task. It looks like this forum is mostly for Reader users?? I use Acrobat Pro and would love to know if anybody has found a solution for Pro. THANK YOU!! And I'm wondering how hard is it to make a fix?? Can't this be a QUICK FIX in the continuous update? 

Participating Frequently
October 18, 2023

Hi Sheryl, I also use Acrobat Pro and have not found any solution to the invisible scroll bar problem. I think that part of the interface is probably the same between Reader and Pro. The whole situation is very frustrating. Not to mention astonishing. How could a company like Adobe make this big of a blunder?

New Participant
October 17, 2023

Just in case Adobe folk are too busy planning new brilliant innovations to read chorus of complaints about disappearing scroll bar, has anyone considered gathering this harvest of grievances to make a collective demand, start a petition, make some noise ?

Inspiring
October 17, 2023

Not to beat a dead horse, but just jumping in to add what a terrible idea this was and how unhelpful Adobe is being in regards to this. Hopefully the chorus of anger makes them BRING BACK THE SCROLL BAR

Known Participant
October 7, 2023

I was able to pull the previous verson from my SuperDuper backup, and, as a further measure, I created a subfolder to keep earlier versions around. I wouldn't do this for all applications, but Acrobat is sure one of them!

New Participant
October 8, 2023

Disappearing scroll bar is an unbelievably stupid, mischievous modification. Frustrates users and complicates their work. Please recover your senses and re-install visible scroll bar.

 

 

New Participant
October 1, 2023

I HATE THE NEW SYSTEM. ADOBE IS USELESS TO ME NOW. I STILL HAVEN'T FIGURED OUT HOW TO SCROLL THROUGH MY DOCUMENTS. PLEASE GIVE US BACK THE OLD WAY TO SCROLL. CAN SOMEONE HELP ME. I HAVE TRIED EVERYTHING AND GETTING REALLY FRUSTRATED.

New Participant
October 2, 2023

On a Mac desktop under Sonoma, I find that the trick is to press the Up-Arrow or Down-Arrow key, which makes the thumb appear, and grab the thumb with the mouse before releasing the key. It's a cumbersome nuisance requiring two hands, but a feasible work-around until Adobe gives us back a way to keep the scroll bar visible.

Enchanted_difference1549
Inspiring
October 2, 2023

Yes, it seems to work in Ventura 13.6 too, click down or up and you see a ghost of scrollbar to catch asap.

It works also in Bookmarks and Pages panels.

BUT it does NOT work in PDF Portfolio document lists, when you have a portfolio made of several files it's always impossible to get a scrollbar, this is nuts, navigating a long list of documents with keyboard is slow as hell due to the rendering of every page.. 

Not everyone has a trackpad/mousewheel always available.. 

 

 

New Participant
October 1, 2023

If you are using a Mac desktop and you would like to view the scrollbars in Acrobat Reader, this is actually controled in your desktop preferences. 

1. Open your System Settings.

2. Select Appearance from the options on the left-hand side. 

3. Under the section titled "Show Scroll Bars," click on the radio button next to the word, Always.

I hope everyone finds this useful. 

Participating Frequently
October 1, 2023

There is no System Settings on my Mac, only System Preferences, and the options are arranged as a grid. The relevant section is General, and I have the "Always" radio button selected. And there's then two scroll bar issues: no scroll bars visible at all in single-page view, and the continuous scrolling scroll bar is definitely not always visible.

 

(At least contituous scrolling has a scroll bar, but I don't consider it a substitute, as you no longer see 1 page at a time always cleanly centred in the window.)

 

Somebody else further up posted some kind of workaround that, if you followed 3 or 4 slightly annoying steps, would then cause scroll bars to show in Reader's single page view, at least for the duration of that run. (If you restart, you'd need to do the same thing again). But they are not useful scroll bars, as in single page view they let you scroll only around the visible page, should less than all of it be visible, and don't allow navigation through the document.

 

The absence of the document-level scroll bar in page-at-a-time mode represents a significant step back in terms of usefulness. And this is clearly a bug in the macOS version, rather than some wider intended UX change, as the Windows version has a document-level scroll bar in single page mode.

Participating Frequently
October 1, 2023

I also have Touch Mode set to Never in Acrobat Reader itself.