Fix for not showing Acrobat Reader as alternate PDF viewer

[GrontmijNL]

Fix for not showing Acrobat Reader as alternate PDF viewer in Launch Application Toolbar.

PDF-XChange does a lookup in the registry to find the executable named in InstallPath for Adobe Acrobat Reader.
On Windows 7-x64 PDFXEdit looks in HKLM, but not the 32-bit keys for Readers-Installpaths.
PDFXEdit looks in HKLM-64bit keys or in USER-keys, but in the USER-keys often the InstallPath key is missing (maybe Adobe´s fault, but that's the case ).

After install of Acrobat Reader the following key/value is present:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Adobe\Acrobat Reader\10.0\InstallPath
"@"="C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Reader 10.0\Reader"

If you create this value in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Adobe\Acrobat Reader\10.0\InstallPath it will work.

Of course this must be fixed by Tracker in a future builds of this great product!

[Stefan - PDF-XChange]

Hello GrontmijNL,

Welcome to our forums. If you have installed Adobe's reader before the Editor - this value should be there and the Editor will detect the Reader and add it to the quick launch menu. If you installed Editor first and Adobe's reader after - it won't be picked up runtime and added to the Launch list.

Regards,
Stefan

[David.P]

Great find, thanks Grontmij!

Using this trick, I was able to manually add Adobe Acrobat v7 AND v11 to the "launch External" button in PDF-XChange Editor:



This is what I used (e.g. for Acrobat 7):

Code: Select all

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Adobe\Adobe Acrobat\7.0\InstallPath]
@="F:\\Program Files (x86)\\Adobe\\Acrobat 7.0\\Acrobat"

Strangely, this only works if the Acrobat executable (called "Acrobat.exe") is not renamed (which I had done originally, in order to better distinguish between Acrobat 7 and Acrobat 11 -- which both have the same executable name).

Cheers David.P

[GrontmijNL]

Hello GrontmijNL,

Welcome to our forums. If you have installed Adobe's reader before the Editor - this value should be there and the Editor will detect the Reader and add it to the quick launch menu. If you installed Editor first and Adobe's reader after - it won't be picked up runtime and added to the Launch list.

Regards,
Stefan

That's not true most of the time. And certainly not for Acrobat Reader X and if the installation was done by another user (like the system account used by MS SCCM/Config manager).
Also decency on the installation sequence of products is a bad design issue in my opinion.
I suggest that your developer team must change the lookup so the 32 and also 64-bit registrykeys will be searched to be 100% accurate.

[Seeker45]

That's not true most of the time. And certainly not for Acrobat Reader X and if the installation was done by another user (like the system account used by MS SCCM/Config manager). Also decency on the installation sequence of products is a bad design issue in my opinion.I suggest that your developer team must change the lookup so the 32 and also 64-bit registrykeys will be searched to be 100% accurate.

You have my full support for this request. We have so many servers, and some servers had Acrobat Pro 9 installed before. During migration we had both Acrobat Pro 9 and PDF-XChange Editor installed. After our tests had been completed, we have uninstalled Acrobat Pro 9 and installed Acrobat Reader 11 (few programs insists on Acrobat as viewer ). Now, we have the old Acrobat Pro 9 under "Launch:" which obviousy does not work anymore, and worse, we cannot correct this, i.e. we cannot replace this with Acrobat Reader 11.

Ralf

[Will - Tracker Supp]

Thanks for the posts guys, I will put this to the Dev. Team to as a request to change/improve this behaviour.

Cheers,

[Ivan - Tracker Software]

fixed

[Seeker45]

Hi Ivan,

ok, "fixed"..... what does this exactly mean? Will be fixed in the next release?

If so, then there may be no need to pursue my inquiry https://forum.pdf-xchange.com/ ... 62&t=20951 anymore.

Thanks.

Ralf

[Stefan - PDF-XChange]

Hi Ralf,

Yes the fix will be in the next build, but I will ask Ivan for some more details on to whether your other enquiry is also resolved with this fix.

Regards,
Stefan