Install Acrobat and Acrobat Reader simultaneously

Question

We have a backup laptop with four user profiles: three assigned to colleagues and one that we use for presentations. The latter is an “open” profile, accessible to clients of our business center.

The three colleague profiles each have a paid Acrobat subscription.

On the fourth (“open”) user profile, we also want to be able to view PDF documents (e.g., presentations provided as PDFs instead of PowerPoint). However, we do not want to use a paid Acrobat account for this. The reason is obvious: it would give any random user of the open user profile access to personal documents.

Acrobat Reader would do the trick here.

However, it seems that if Acrobat is installed, Acrobat Reader cannot be installed alongside it.

Is that correct? And if so, are there any possible workarounds?

Meenakshi_Negi · Accepted Answer

Hi ICAB Incubator,

Thank you for reaching out.

Adobe now offers a 64-bit Unified Installer that combines Acrobat and Reader functionality. So if you install the Reader on the machine, it upgrades to Acrobat only when you sign in using the Adobe ID with a paid subscription.

You may configure it to behave like Reader without requiring sign-in. Download the installer for Reader and add this registry key to enforce Reader mode:

Path: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Adobe\Adobe Acrobat\DC\FeatureLockDown
Key: bIsSCReducedModeEnforcedEx
Type: DWORD
Value: 1

This forces Acrobat to run in Reader mode unless a user signs in with a paid account

Check if that helps.

Let us know how it goes.

Thanks,

Meenakshi

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