How to override initial view settings?

[morganw4118444]

How can I override the initial view settings of a document?

[Thom Parker]

Which setting do you want to override, and under what circumstances?

[morganw4118444]

The initial zoom and window-size settings.  Otherwise, I'll be trying to review 10 documents in a window and then an 11th one will ruin the window size and zoom settings for the other 10 documents because some weirdo decided the document had to be viewed in an 18-inch window at 188% zoom level.

[Thom Parker]

Unfortunately there isn't a really good way to do this. There are a couple of settings in the Acrobat Preferences that may help, you'll need to experiment to get the best results. Look on the "Documents", "Page Display", and "General" panels.  For example, on the "Documents" panel, uncheck the "Open Documents as new tabs in same window".  Now new docs open in thier own window, so resizing the window at least doesn't affect the other docs. And there are other options that may be helpfult. 

Another way to help mitigate this situation is to write a script that you can invoke to reset the view parameters to the ones you want. Unfortunately window size is not one of these 😞  But all the document level view parameters are. 

[morganw4118444]

Thank you.  Unfortunately my understanding is that the initial view settings set by the document creator override all the user-specified initial view settings.  Thus my question was a long-shot in the first place, but I wanted to make sure there is no way to override the creator-specified settings.

Can the scripting interface you describe adjust initial zoom level AND override the PDF creator's chosen initial zoom setting?  My impression is that the windows sometimes undergo unwanted resizing simply to accommodate a highly zoomed-in initial view that was set by the creator. 

[Thom Parker]

Acrobat does what it does when the document is first opened. But after that point a script can be used to set the current view settings and even some of the document initail view settings can be changed. 

You can create a toolbar button or menu item that will run a script to setup the view parameters you'd like. 

[morganw4118444]

So I guess that script will have to be run every single time I open a new PDF?  How would I accomplish that?

It seems far preferable just to allow the user to disable the problematic behavior in the first place.

[Thom Parker]

That would be a really good feature in Acrobat. I'm supprised there isn't a preference that basically disables the document view settings.  After all, shouldn't the user viewing the document have the final say over it, but that's up to Adobe.