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Participant
April 21, 2023
Answered

Acrobat won't apply redactions

  • April 21, 2023
  • 5 replies
  • 20111 views

Hello,

I work for the IT Department in Local Government in South Wales. We have a few staff who use Adobe Acrobat - Subscription licence users. Our Legal department who use it daily are having issues with redaction. No matter how large or small the PDF or how many words/sentenced they want to redact, it just won't apply. When 'apply' is clicked, a pop up comes up with the spinning circle which never goes away. They then have to hit esc and run a debugging tool.

All of the Team are having this issue. 

The software is up to date, I ran a software repair, tried saving a new PDF, but nothing has worked. The whole Team are having the same issue on all PDF's. I also checked document security which was fine. The only correlation between the users is that we use Sharepoint and the PDF's are always saved to Sharepoint. I did try saving one locally to see if that made a difference but out policies don't all that.

Has anyone else encountered this issue? Any idea what could be causing it?

Many thanks

Correct answer David J D

reposting the workaround so it's a bit easier to find:

We have managed to resolve this issue on our end by changing the language from ENGLISH WITH ARABIC SUPPORT to ENGLISH; 

Edit>Preferences>Language
Select "Choose at application startup",

close Acrobat and reopen it.

When prompted, select English and check if the issue with the redact tool is resolved.


Also to add we raised this with Adobe Support who advised they are aware of this as bug "ADC-4414306".
The supposed earliest possible date for a fix will be the September however this is not a guaranteed date. 

5 replies

Participant
January 19, 2024

For my company it's wasnt specifically related to just inserting .doc it was a little bit of everything. The blank white screen after authenticating, followed by the error that some features in adobe are unaviable, to redacting, to merging, to fill in sign. After working with Adobe the fix seemed way to simple but it did the trick for us! 

Adobe Support had me go to 
C:\Program Files\Adobe
Right Click Adobe DC
Click Properties
Click Security Tab
Click Advance
Remove both SID permission profiles starting with the letter "S" in our case it was 
S-1-15-3-1024-3635283841-2530182609-996808640-1887759898-3848208603-3313616867-983405619-2501854204
S-1-15-2-1980882837-3654086619-1222525990-3753702683-3075969641-4188866857-51130414

According to Adobe, these SID's are meant to be be removed after the install/update is completed. However for what ever reason for versions after the September release the SID's are remaining in the profiles and when launching Adobe it's defaulting to the Adobe SID's instead of the Entitled User. Adobe is working with Microsoft on this issue.

Participating Frequently
July 1, 2024

This solved my problem but I actually had to start at C:\Program Files (x86).

It took a little experimenting to delete these two profiles (They still appear after deleting until you completely back out of security tab.)

Participant
July 2, 2024

Oh Good!! Adobe Support followed up about a month ago and stated the following below as a long term fix

Greetings! Our Engineering team is waiting for an update from your end on this.

 

They have incorporated the support in installer to remove the problematic msix permissions. The fix is done under a feature lockdown key, We would like you test this on an impacted machine and let us know the results.  

 

Here are the steps we need to follow –

  1. Install Acrobat/Reader Oct 2023 build (23.006.20360).
  2. Check for folder permissions (Acrobat, AcroCEF etc.)
  3. You would see special permissions.
  4. Create the below reg key.
    1. Key Path: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Adobe\Installer
    2. Value: RemoveMSIXAccessRule   [dword 32 type]
    3. Data: 1
  5. Now apply latest April consumer build's patch and these special permissions should be removed.
    https://www.adobe.com/devnet-docs/acrobatetk/tools/ReleaseNotesDC/continuous/dccontinuousapr2024.html#dccontinuousaprtwentytwentyfour
Participant
December 20, 2023

We are having this again now and also experienced the same about 1 year ago. At that time I had to connect with Adobe support who took me through a long process of changing various back-end files. It did work at the time, but the problem has returned.

 

Adobe should have sorted this problem out by now, 12 months on from that. It's a bit ridiculous they haven't.

David J DCorrect answer
Participant
June 7, 2023

reposting the workaround so it's a bit easier to find:

We have managed to resolve this issue on our end by changing the language from ENGLISH WITH ARABIC SUPPORT to ENGLISH; 

Edit>Preferences>Language
Select "Choose at application startup",

close Acrobat and reopen it.

When prompted, select English and check if the issue with the redact tool is resolved.


Also to add we raised this with Adobe Support who advised they are aware of this as bug "ADC-4414306".
The supposed earliest possible date for a fix will be the September however this is not a guaranteed date. 

Participant
August 23, 2023

Thank you, this has been bugging me for days. As two users in the business I work for (also South Wales, small world eh?) could not get redaction to work under thier profiles (which do not have Admin rights). I found that on the same laptops when logged in as an Administrator on the PC that redaction was working, leaving me to think it was being caused by a Roaming Profile issue?  However this language "Fix" has worked for both of them!

Participant
June 2, 2023

Having the same issue with some of our users (another UK government in the South!), with the loading wheel working with local, OneDrive, SharePoint and mapped drive locations. Using version 2023.001.20143 (latest available release).

Participant
June 5, 2023

We have managed to resolve this issue on our end by changing the language from ENGLISH WITH ARABIC SUPPORT to ENGLISH; 

Edit>Preferences>Language
Select "Choose at application startup",

close Acrobat and reopen it.

When prompted, select English and check if the issue with the redact tool is resolved.


Participant
June 6, 2023

This is brilliant thank you so much - my head was going further and further into a brick wall!!

Participant
April 21, 2023

Just to add to this - I installed the software for myself and the same thing is happening

Participant
April 28, 2023

We are getting the same (also from a UK goverment in the southeast)

Version 2023.001.20143 | 64-bit
Mix of Laptop and VDI devices. 

When applying a redaction (of any size) you get a white box with a spinning icon and thats it. 

 

Last known working version was 2022.002.20191

Participant
April 28, 2023

Forgot to add I tested with a local file and a sharepoint file - same on both.