Participant

Answered

Why change everything?

Forum|Forum|2 years ago
June 22, 2023
91 replies
219333 views

Why? Why do you "creators" feel a need to completely change the layout of toolbars, etc. in a program?! Do you have nothing to do so you just search out what you can do to aggravate us? Adobe Acrobat DC is now TOTALLY different in the toolbar layouts! WHY???

Modern Acrobat

Correct answer Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com

Was this even tested before it was released to the public?
By @DCProud 202

Adobe has pre-release testers for all the Creative Suite programs and Acrobat. Occassionally I see Adobe announce for people to join the testing program.

Many of us community experts here in the forums are testers for Adobe, and many of us have been doing this since the 1980s and 1990s.

I can't recall much positive feedback from the testers before the "modern" Acrobat was released to the public. I know my comments back to the engineers were fairly extensive. Some things were improved (darkening the icons from a light gray to a dark gray, for example). But for the most part, the comments have fallen on deaf ears.

Over the past 18 months, I personally have continued to use and test the newest beta releases, but I often have to abandon them and switch to another computer that runs the "classic" interface. I have only so much time to donate to Adobe to dignose problems (and provide detailed bug reports and comments to the engineers). I, like most folks here, have a job to do. Working for free for Adobe is not on my to-do list.

3 suggestions:

Disable the new Acrobat and revert back to the "classic" interface. I believe that all of the old functionality is still active there.
Join the Acrobat beta testing group. I don't know where to direct you to join, but try searching for a public page in the Acrobat section of Adobe's website.
Consider another brand of PDF editing software. The PDF file format was placed into the public domain about 15 years ago and since then, other companies have developed competing programs. Wikipedia has a decent list of other brands. One of our favorites is ABBY Fine Reader/PDF.

But note that none of these competing programs have all the features of Acrobat, so if you're in certain industries, you're really stuck with Adobe Acrobat. These industry-specific features include:

Accessible PDFs and documents
PDF forms
Printing, graphic arts, and preflighting for print
Security
Digital signatures
Automated PDF documents (aka, stuff like bank statements created from a database a on grand scale)

So see if any other alternative brand gets the job done for you. Be careful of the company's country of origin: you might not be able to install software from certain countries, which is the case here in the US for government computers. Example: FoxIt is a Chinese company and usually is not allowed on our government clients' computers.

As always, don't forget to voice your comments on UserVoice and click the button to VOTE. That is the only place where Adobe takes notice of customers.

Let Adobe know:

You can voice your opinion about the new interface at UserVoice: https://acrobat.uservoice.com/forums/590923-acrobat-for-windows-and-mac/suggestions/47082691-ditch-t...

Be sure to leave a comment about your experience with the new interface. They need to hear from users. And don't forget to click the VOTE button.

FYI, UserVoice is Adobe's official website where it reads and takes into account suggestions and complaints from users of its various products. On the other hand, this community forum is a user-to-user help forum.

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Mark25055654fwx5

Participant

If developpers don't dream up more and more changes all the time, there will be no development to do, and they'll have to go find different jobs.

I forget which program it was I was using recenlty (don't think it was Adobe though), and the 'x' we have all come accustomed to finding in the top right corner of the page, they now have it situated in the centre top of the page. Really? After decades of it being where it was, it working just fine, and everyone knowing where it was, someone decides it should be somewhere else.

There should be a number of people (programmer, development project manager, middle managers, and a VP or two) out of a job for doing these things.

Nancy OShea

Community Expert

If developers don't dream up more and more changes all the time, there will be no development to do, and they'll have to go find different jobs.

By @Mark25055654fwx5

=======

That's such a silly remark. There's no shortage of jobs to do. Adobe makes changes to software to keep pace with what Microsoft and Apple are doing. If Adobe didn't make changes, your software would be incompatible with your computer's operating system. Full stop.

Nancy O'Shea— Product User & Community Expert

Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com

Legend

2 things to note:

1) Adobe's developers don't make the decisions about what goes into or gets changed in the software. The marketing department does that, which is why comments at https://acrobat.uservoice.com/, which is overseen by marketing, have greater weight than those in the volunteer user-to-user Community Forum where this post resides. Today, programmers are just code jockeys who are told what to do. They even have to get approval to correct bugs.

So don't beat up the developers for this fiasco of a revamp. They were just doing what they were told to do.

It's the design team that did this, but again under management's instructions. They threw out 40+ years of research on human behavior and GUI / UI / UX design and created a mess that doesn't even allow access to some of Acrobat's widely-used utilities — tools that many businesses and industries need to run their businesses every day.

2) I've been a beta tester/advisor for Adobe and hundreds of other companies for nearly 40 years. I've been through a lot of operating system changes for all OSs.

As a beta tester, I'm starting to see the new features and utilities planned for Acrobat-Sometime-in-the-Future (and I'm very excited about them)! But none of those features, or the current features, or their operating systems require changing icons, or designing 2 icons to look nearly identical but have polar opposite functions, or leaving lables off icons so users play "WTF is THIS icon for", or superimposing tool panels on top of content, or hiding some long-standing tools altogether, or making the scroll bars invisible on Mac OS, or flipping the location of tools left-to-right and vise versa, or...?

Operating systems generally don't control functions or GUI design, just behind-the-scenes coding requirements. When it comes to the cosemetic interface appearance, they recommend certain overall design aesthetic or theme, but don't require it AFAIK. When a change like that is made by Adobe, I haven't seen it change functionality, just merely a facelift of what's there already, like the movement to a simplified less-cluttered interface design but not the elimination of a function.

As far as I can tell from Adobe's beta/prerelease comments, nothing in this last GUI overhaul was caused by a change or requirement in either OS. (And if it did, think a little stronger about that idea — which OS would Adobe comply with, Windows or Apple? Mobile or desktop?)

Something positive:

If you'd like to contribute an idea of what would make Acrobat work better for you (no complaints — Adobe has heard enough of them!), hop over to an Acrobat Wish List post https://acrobat.uservoice.com/forums/590923-acrobat-for-windows-and-mac/suggestions/48153893-new-acrobat-wish-list-for-a-better-interface

Let Adobe know what's missing from the new version, what you need to have restored, and what new features you'd like.

We might actually see some progress on this!

|    Bevi Chagnon   |  Designer, Trainer, & Technologist for Accessible Documents ||    PubCom |    Classes & Books for Accessible InDesign, PDFs & MS Office |

K

Karen3321586214yx

Participant

Regina, I couldn't agree with you more! I was able to disable the new Adobe!

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Brad360778959bnx

Participant

The ability to revery back to the "old" layout has disappeared in the latest version of Acrobat Pro. I hate that page numbering and document zoom are on the side & can't be moved back to the top. Stop changing things that aren't broken ! If you're going to move layouts, at least give users the ability to move the bars back where we want them . . .the users !

Frans v.d. Geest

Community Expert

It is still here after the latest update...

A

Atlantic Print

Participant

I've come to this thread because I've had enough to the new format. I've had to go back to the old version. Why move everything? It's so buggy and crashes all the time. Like someone has said in this thread already... "Why? Just why!!"

Melissa Luce

Participant

Some things are better left alone.

E

Ellie Nowels

Participant

View/disable new Acrobat causes the program to crash on my Mac. So I am stuck with searching for my tool bars!

J

JohnnyValkonian

Participating Frequently

Try uninstalling and reinstalling. I know it's a pain but it may work.

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Miguel Medalha

Participant

Another issue is the background color. It's too light, resulting in a very poor contrast between the displayed pages and the window background.. This issue had already appeared when Acrobat DC was first launched in 2015 and it was heavily criticized. Well, there it is again!

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Miguel Medalha

Participant

For example, the "Manage Actions" tool just disappeared. There is now a button for something called "Use guided actions" but when we try to use it, a window pops up saying "The new Acrobat experience does not support this feature yet". Meaning, they decided to completely change the thing and realease it without even having completed their work. This is very serious for our workflow. If Adobe continues on this path we will start searching for a new PDF editor, made by someone who doesn't hate its users.

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Miguel Medalha

Participant

On top of the new horrible interface, Acrobat is now crashing when we try to open a linked PDF file. Again. After disabling the new interface, it doesn't crash anymore, so it's definitelly connected to the recent changes. This happened on ALL computers at my workplace, which means that it's not a problem with a specific machine. Also, some important functions for the production of our newspaper suddenly disapeared in the new version. Sometimes, Adobe seems to hate its professional users.

kglad

Community Expert

@Miguel Medalha

disable the new acrobat if you don't like it.

try67

Community Expert

It's not just a question of "not liking the new version", as if it's an issue of personal preferences. The new version is riddled with bugs. We keep finding new ones every single day. It should never have been released in this state for public consumption. It's barely a beta version at this point. Adobe needs to first fix all of these issues, and then start thinking about whether it's a desirable change in the first place. For many people it's not, even if it worked perfectly.

S

SevniIllo35332796pwha

Participant

I generally like new versions in every apps but really dislike this new Adobe reader. I really appreciate developers effort to bring us something new, but after some time trying it I happily reverted back.

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