Acrobat icon turns red

[Alberto Crobe]

The Acrobat Pro icon has turned red since a few days. It was originally black! Is it a logo change or something to fix? The main problem is that Acrobat Pro and Acrobat Reader now have the same icon and, having both apps, I want to tell them apart.

[JR Boulay]

It turns black a few months ago, now it's back to how it was before. 

[Alberto Crobe]

Thanks for your reply.

What a pity! I preferred the dark one because it distinguished two applications that are actually different.

Strange, however, that you still see the old icon on this page (right) in the download link.

[JR Boulay]

I've been following this (arbitrary) rule for years: Reader is the icon on the left, Pro is the icon on the right.

😉

[Test Screen Name]

It was changed red to black without warning - and people with black backgrounds complained bitterly because the icon disappeared. So now it's changed back without warning. I'm waiting for people with red backgrounds to complain...

[Dov Isaacs · Accepted solution]

(1)  All the Acrobat icons (Reader, Standard, and Pro) are now white on red. The black was a very bad design mistake reviled by many if not most customers as well as a large number of Adobe employees. The black icon with no border was exceptionally hard to distinguish on dark backgrounds or with dark themes both with Windows and MacOS.

(2)  Despite what you may be told or believe, you really should not have both Reader and either Standard or Pro installed in parallel on a single system, either of the same or different versions. Acrobat Pro is a superset of Acrobat Standard which is a superset of Reader. Having both Reader and either Standard or Pro installed can lead to significant “issues.” Going forward, expect that the installers will no longer allow such parallel installations.

[JR Boulay]

Dov Isaacs In this case, how do you go about testing PDF forms with Acrobat Reader if you only have Acrobat Pro on your computer?

What do you recommend?

This is a real question (knowing that I am not going to buy another computer just for this). 

[Dov Isaacs]

Simply open the PDF file with forms in Acrobat. Unless you access tools in Acrobat related to forms creation or modification, it should be the same exact experience.

Are you concerned about some Javascript or plug-ins that work in Acrobat that might not work in Reader?

[JR Boulay]

"Are you concerned about some Javascript or plug-ins that work in Acrobat that might not work in Reader?"

Sure, this is why I need to test them carefully with Acrobat Reader.

Before I worked on Mac and I even had several versions of Acrobat Reader (9, XI and DC) because some of my clients use old versions.

This is the only reason I keep my "old" MacBookPro  in a safe place.