Commenting tool broken in latest update (for Mac v. 2023.003.20284 Pro

Report · Sep 07, 2023

I'm so confused. Beyond confused and unbelievablly frustrated. This is impacting my job.

See screenshot below. I have a PDF open and simply trying to add a comment. I right click, hit Add Comment and the below box pops up completely blocking the original PDF. You notice no PDF is visible, only the huge white box and down in the right hand corner very small it says Cancel or Post. When I type my Comment, I can't even see any words appearing on screen. I can't tell what I'm typing because it's not visible. And I'm on a larger monitor here. After blind typing I hit Post and I think it worked but unlike in the previous iteration of Acrobat Pro, a small comment box is NOT visible on the PDF for me to know there is a comment there. When I mouseover to the right hand side of the PDF a GIANT and I mean GIANT comment box appears, big yellow box that blocks out a chunk of the PDF and fills a margin area as wide as the PDF itself with the small text i blind-typed in the middle.

This is absurd. What is going on? Is this a known bug? Is there some setting I can change? Is no one else having this issue on Mac? Please help! I'm struggling to do my job with this issue.

Report · Sep 07, 2023

Try "Disable New Acrobat" to go back to the old UI. The menu item is under "View".

Report · Sep 07, 2023

That's helpful...to a degree. I could at least see the Comment I am typing now, that is the extent of the improvement.

After posting it, it's still not visible on the document as it used to be, as a little comment bubble...and it appears huge when rolling over the area of the PDF. This is bizarre functionality. See how it looks, second screenshot.

Report · Sep 08, 2023

Hi @David32133915ujpa

Hope you are doing well and thanks for sharing your observation.

We are actively working on all the suggestions, and we will address them with the highest priority.

We acknowledge that the new Acrobat represents a notable change; however, we hope that as you get familiar with the new interface, you can be more productive and get more out of Acrobat.

As you get more comfortable with the new interface, please contact us with specific questions on tools, features, or functionalities. We’re happy to provide helpful resources and answers to your questions.

We will follow up with a detailed community-featured post, guiding you to familiarise yourself with the new interface and regular updates on upcoming changes.

Regards

Amal

Report · Sep 08, 2023

Thanks for reaching out with the response, Amal. I'm fine with getting used to most of the layout changes, but the Commenting feature seems completely broken. Not a "new interface" but an unusable interface. Without Commenting, I won't be able to use Acrobat for my job. Otherwise, the changes are easy enough to get used to. I'm not a huge fan of the up and down arrows being moved to the lower right hand corner but that's very minor. Commenting is essential, and I just can't use the program without it functioning usably.

Report · Sep 13, 2023

I wish to further complain to you about the latest update to Acrobat Pro and the Commenting function. It's unbelievable how buggy it is. I just received a PDF file with comments in it. I'm trying to respond to each comment within the comment - adding a reply to the comment. Any time I try to use the scroll wheel on my mouse to scroll the content of the comment, the app CRASHES. I repeat, I scroll within a comment, the app CRASHES. This has happened to me four times in the row. Again, this Acrobat is unusable. I am astounded that this piece of software used by millions of businesses across the world would suddenly become garbage in such a short time. Am I mad? Yes, I'm furious that you are interfering with my job with this awful update. I'm sickened you didn't test this update more thoroughly before releasing it.

Report · Sep 15, 2023

Hi @David32133915ujpa ,

I hope you're doing well despite the challenges you've been facing with the new Acrobat experience. We understand how frustrating it can be when your critical workflow is affected. Rest assured, we're here to assist you in resolving these issues.

Firstly, thank you for providing us with some information about the problems you're encountering. Let's tackle these step by step:

Switch to the Old UI: If you're more comfortable with the old UI, you can easily switch back by going to the "Menu" on the top left corner of Windows or the "View" menu on MacOS. This might help you regain familiarity with the interface.
Crashing Issue: To address the application crashing problem, it's important to determine if this is specific to a particular PDF file or if it happens with all PDFs. Please try opening a different PDF file to see if the issue persists. If you're accessing the PDF from a shared network/drive, consider downloading it locally to your computer and then attempting to open it again.
Update Adobe Acrobat: Ensure that you have the most recent version, 23.06.20320, installed. You can check for updates by going to "Help" and selecting "Check for updates." After updating, it's a good practice to reboot your computer to ensure the changes take effect.
Repair Installation (Windows Only): If you're using a Windows system, you can try repairing the installation from the Help menu. Sometimes, this can resolve underlying issues.
Reset Acrobat Preferences: Occasionally, problems can be related to corrupted preferences. You can attempt to reset your Acrobat preferences to default settings following the instructions provided in this How to reset Acrobat Preference settings to defaul... - Adobe Support Community - 4792082 . This might help alleviate any software-specific issues.

We sincerely hope that one of these solutions will resolve the problems you're encountering. If you continue to face issues or have any further questions, please don't hesitate to reach out. Your workflow is important to us, and we're committed to assisting you until everything is running smoothly again.

Regards

Amal

Report · Jan 02, 2024

I agree. I use Acrobat commenting as a main component of my job. The latest update is TERRIBLE. I've tried all of the "fixes" on here and nothing can make it functional again. It's not just a "new" way of doing things, it's absolutely broken. It wasn't broken before, why "upgrade" it and then completely render it useless? But, such is Adobe I suppose.

Report · Jan 02, 2024

So true. And recently I have discovered on my Mac that Adobe Acrobat is an unbelievable CPU hog! It uses 80% of my CPU even when I'm not reading a PDF, while Acrobat is minimized. It lags and causes other programs to freeze. And I'm on M2 Max processor. Is gotten so ridiculous that I have switched to Preview for most PDF functions.

Report · Jan 03, 2024

Hi @ambero13873095

What happens when you try to comment the pdf file? Do you get any error message? If yes, please share the screenshot of the same for more clarity. Also, make sure you have the latest version 23.08.2042X installed from the help menu > check for updates and reboot the computer once.

@David32133915ujpa please go to Preferences (Cmd+K) > Page Display > under Rendering, uncheck 'Use page cache' > click Ok and reboot the application and check.

~Amal

Report · Jan 03, 2024

Thank you for replying @Amal. My original error that I posted about has stopped happening. But since then I've become more and more frustrated with a) the updated UX in multiple areas (including Commenting, which the original post was about), and b) the CPU usage of Adobe Acrobat Pro (for Mac). I have it on both my personal M1 Max Macbook Pro with 32 GB RAM and my work M2 Max Pro with 16 GB RAM. And I have experienced numerous issues with it on both. I barely even know where to start, all the problems I've had with it. But the biggest one is the CPU usage. I took screenshots of how much of a CPU hog it is, using the Activity Utility. I see it spike OVER 100% CPU usage and I've seen it at 80% when Acrobat was minimized!

I started checking the CPU usage because I was running an online game that host for my friends while I had Acrobat open and the game kept freezing, which had never happened to me before. So then I checked the CPU usage and that's where i saw it. After I close Acrobat, the program ran without freezing any longer. Acrobat was using significantly more CPU percent than anything else open at the time and I had very few programs open. I hosted the game again last week and used Preview to read my PDFs during the game and there were no freeze-ups. Then on my work computer, the M2 MAX, I notice that resizing PDFs, just grabbing the corner of the window to make the screen size different--is extremely laggy. I will drag the corner and then have to wait like 15 seconds before the Acrobat window adjusts itself! This is totally unacceptable out of my fast-paced work needs. i've seen other people struggle with Acrobat when presenting too! I checked CPU usage and it was spiking over 100%, which seems impossible. But there you have it. Since I switched to Preview, it's extremely fast now. No lag. All the updates that have happened over the past 6 months or so have made Acrobat unusable for me. The dev team has over-engineered the functionality (moved things to new places that were perfectly good where they were and are now less convenient to access, changed functionality without allowing user preference setting options) and under-optimized the performance (slow, laggy, high CPU usage). Acrobat was perfectly good a year ago. Now it's worse than useless to me, it's counterproductive.

Report · Jan 04, 2024

Hi @David32133915ujpa

Thanks for sharing your observation.

Our community of users open over 300 billion PDFs every year in Acrobat, and process more than 8 billion digital signatures. Designing a new Acrobat, an application so ubiquitous that it's used by over 100 million users each day, presents unique challenges. 

 Even the simplest of changes can have an enormous impact on a wide range of users taking on everyday tasks. 

So why change anything?  The reason was simple: Users were having difficulty finding and using the tools in Acrobat’s viewer (the landing page that opens on launching a PDF). To create an exceptional experience and a flexible framework in a product like Acrobat, we listened to our users in our community and considered every platform, at every size, for every tool, to develop the new Acrobat experience.

For more information on new Acrobat, please check the help page https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/learn-new-acrobat.html

Hope this information will help.

~Amal

Report · Mar 09, 2024

I have had issues as well.... mine is largely from commenting as a "reply." The replies will break off to form their own comment. So now they appear as a new issue instead of an old reply to a comment which has already been resolved.

This software is becoming atrocious. How are we supposed to proof with this??