Hi all,
This is a problem that has been going on for years, and it's time it was addressed. I came across this post in 2020 https://community.adobe.com/t5/acrobat-discussions/update-of-acrobat-dc-changes-default-printer/td-p... that describes the same problem. I've been tolerating it for at least as long, but I'm so tired of it, that I'm going to try to bring it to the attention of Adobe, as I'm sure it needs a development fix, rather than something in setting, or something I'm missing.
If you don't have Adobe Acrobat as your default printer, or if you only use the default printer preferences, you will not even know that this problem exists.
I try not to print out anything I don't have to, to paper, so I always have my default printer set to Adobe Acrobat. I do not let Windows manage the printer, because that's a stupid feature and can't possibly help me, or anyone else in this world in any way at all, that can't be solved by specifying the default printer manually.
Every time Adobe Acrobat does an update - and you don't know when this happens, because it happens in the background with no notification, the default printer is changed to something else. This is mildly irritating, as when you are working quickly, you can miss that your expected Acrobat printer is not selected. I often use CTRL + P, then Enter, to speed up workflow. To add to the frustration and wasted paper though, if I do intercept the print and change the default printer back to Adobe Acrobat, the printing preferences have changed also. Again, mildly irritating, but the frustration is building because; if I don't remember to check and change the default preferences, Acrobat spews out a document or documents with sometimes hundreds of pages or garbled junk, that I have to wait to finish and then delete, before starting over.
There are two settings in the printing preferences that I use, that always get reset when Acrobat updates - firstly, I have a modified print setting, which controls my quality of print, and second, there is a tick box to "Rely on system fonts only; do not use document fonts". This always gets ticked on, and because "system fonts" does not contain my document font, I get the garbled junk output, that multiplies up into hundreds of pages sometimes, from a one or two page document.
So frustration really building now, particular if that happens. But it's easy to manually reset - I hear you say. Well it is, but you can't do it in your document, because that won't set the printer preferences globally, so it will happen again in another application somewhere. So you have to interrupt your flow and depart from the document where you've discovered the printer isn't default - so an update must have occurred, and go to the system setting and printers. There you have to reset the default printer, and go into preferences and reset my normal settings, before I can return to my document and continue to print.
So, there are three problems as I see it:
1. The default printer is changed to another printer during an Acrobat update.
2. The customer set printing preferences are not maintained during the Acrobat update.
3. The error handling of the so called "missing" system fonts - which are installed in Windows BTW, is appalling. This should fail over to a usable font, or at worst, fail to print with an error.
So Adobe, time to step up and resolve this years old issue, that drives me nuts every two or three weeks!
Of course, if the community have any input that I haven't covered, or suggestions, I'd happily hear them.
Thanks all,
M
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