Comments Pane in Acrobat will not disable

[Tessellate]

Hello all,

All I did was add a text box comment to the document, now the comment pane shows up everytime I open it. I have attached the offending PDF.  At this point I will discontinue using comments, a bit annoying.

I go to the Preferences in Acrobat, in the Commenting category. I then uncheck the "show comments pane when a PDF with comments is opened", then hit the OK button and preferences closes. I then close the program, have restarted my computer, yet when I open a document with comments the comments pane shows back up and when I go back into preferences the box is checked again. I also did an uninstall and reinstall, but that did not help either.

I have also tried the check "Restore last view settings when reopening documents" without success.

Does anyone have any idea to resolve this or is this a bug that Adobe needs to fix, if so how do I submit this for processing...?

[Tessellate · Accepted solution]

Hello Amal,

I think I have finally solved it.

When in the document that has the text comment and I uncheck the box for "Show comments pane when a PDF with comments is opened" and hit OK, it checks the box again. So this time I open a different PDF document that did not have any comments in it, went to Preferences, Commenting, uncheck the box for "Show comments pane when a PDF with comments is opened" and then went to Preferences, Documents and made sure that the "Restore last view settings when reopening documents" was also checked, then hit OK. Opened the document with the text comments, it did initially open the comments pane, I closed it and then when I opened it again it remembered to "Restore last view settings when reopening documents" and did not open it again.

So the trick for me was to uncheck the box for the "Show comments pane when a PDF with comments is opened" when in a document that has no comments in it...!

[James_Carey3949]

didn't work for me

[JIPNET]

Having the same issue—with ONE pdf in particular. Nothing I do makes any difference to that file. Annoying as it takes a long time to 'count' the comments.

[JIPNET]

Occurs only with the "new" acrobat. Not in the older UI.

[monkey_6489]

As with many others in this thread I tried all other solutions before I finally found success with a variation of this method, basically two minor things I noticed, shown in ALL CAPS below:

1. Go to menu in the top left corner of acrobat -> Disable new Acrobat Reader
2. Program will restart, open PDF with comments
3. The comments pane should open. Click the three dots in the top right of the comments pane, then click "Commenting Preferences"
4. Turn the "Show comments pane when a PDF with comments is opened"
5. Click OK.
6. Close the comment pane
7. THIS IS WHERE SOMETHING NEW HAPPENED.  One time, when I hit the 'Close' button above the comments pane a line of dialog popped up in the same upper right area of the screen as the comment pane, sais something like "The Comment Pane was opened because a Comment was found in the document.  Retain this behavior?"  YES/NO.   Obviously choose "No".  This extra line of dialog either didn't happen the first time I ran through the steps or I didn't notice it, it was a bit subtle.
8. and reopen PDF to make sure setting stuck.
9. Now, hover over "View" (ON MY COMPUTER HOVERING DOES NOTHING, NEED TO CLICK 'VIEW' ON THE MENU BAR) at the top left of the screen and click "Enable new Acrobat Reader" to change the UI back.
10. The preference should now stick. If you ever want to turn the comments pane preference back on, it seems you have to repeat the above steps to make sure it stays on.

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Good luck!

[RticPhoenix]

If you're experiencing issues with comments automatically appearing in Adobe when opening a PDF, here’s a simple solution you might try before using any cleaning tools or reinstalling the program:

1. Open a PDF file that does not contain any comments.
2. Go to Menu > Preferences > Commenting and locate the option "Show comments pane when a PDF with comments is opened."
3. Uncheck the box, then recheck it, and click OK.
4. Return to the Preferences menu, uncheck the same box again, and click OK once more.
5. Open the Preferences tab one last time to confirm that the box remains unchecked. If it does, click Cancel to exit.
6. Close Adobe completely, then reopen the PDF file that contains comments.

After following these steps, the comments should no longer appear automatically. When I tried this, the preference setting finally remained unchecked, whereas before, it would revert back after clicking OK.

While this may not work for everyone experiencing this issue, it’s a quick and easy first step to try.

Best of luck to anyone dealing with this frustrating problem!