Travel Technology - Acrobat glitch

I was printing out a 400+page manual. It is a .pdf file, and all was going nicely. Suddenly, it got to page 256 and then froze.

I had to reboot, and it did the same thing. In fact, just trying to print page 256 would freeze the machine. There is nothing unusual about that page. Pages 257 to the end worked just fine

OS: Win98SE
Acrobat: v. 5.0.5

All good computer geeks will immediately recognize 256 as the point where you roll over from 8 bits to 9, so this may have something to do with it.

Anybody have any clues? I wound up capturing the page as a screen shot and posting it into Power Point and then printing that. Sheesh!

deleted because I didnt read the post properly :o

I've seen it happen with a 40 page document, so it may not be the 8 to 9 bit thing. There was something on that page it didn't like, in my experience usually a graphic. You could spend hours fiddling with it, it won't print.

If you have photoshop by the way, you can open the pdf in that, tell it what page, and print from there, it will be a better quality then a screen print would be.

Can you print pages 257 and beyond? If so that would support Cordelli's suggestion that it is something on page 256. I have had similar experiances on different pages, so I doubt it is the bit issue. I am not sure why, but often for just changing the output to a different printer solves the problem.

It happens because Adobe Acrobat is a total and utter piece of crap.

It happens because Adobe Acrobat is a total and utter piece of crap.

^ ^ ^

Tell it how it is! :D

How about this:

Go to add/remove programs and remove Acrobat 5.

Then, go here (http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readermain.html) and download the new version, it's now called Adobe Reader. See if that fixes you up.

Also, Windows 98 is getting old and is starting to lose support by new software, so if you can, see if you can get updated to Windows XP.

How about this:

Go to add/remove programs and remove Acrobat 5.

Then, go here (http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readermain.html) and download the new version, it's now called Adobe Reader. See if that fixes you up.

Also, Windows 98 is getting old and is starting to lose support by new software, so if you can, see if you can get updated to Windows XP.

Agree entirely. A year or two ago, several people at my company, including me, had a similar problem with Acrobat 5. Moving to Acrobat 6 fixed the problem (running Win NT). However, I tried to load Acrobat 6 on someone's computer who was running Windows ME and Acrobat 6 would not run (apparently 6 does not support ME). You may find the same problem with Win 98, I don't know.

The computer at work runs Win2000 and has Acrobat 5.0.1. It read and printed the page just fine.

Hey!... 98SE is a step up for me! I'm not exactly what you call a bleeding edge guy --- been burned too many times. :)

And, Scott, thank you for your well-reasoned response. You may well be right, but out in the world of non-geeks (you've probably seen one or two of them from time to time), Acrobat allows a convenient distribution of printed data to anybody anywhere with a reasonable expectation that it will print just as you want it to. 62-1/2 gazillion .pdf files can't all be wrong.

The computer at work runs Win2000 and has Acrobat 5.0.1. It read and printed the page just fine.

Hey!... 98SE is a step up for me! I'm not exactly what you call a bleeding edge guy --- been burned too many times. :)

And, Scott, thank you for your well-reasoned response. You may well be right, but out in the world of non-geeks (you've probably seen one or two of them from time to time), Acrobat allows a convenient distribution of printed data to anybody anywhere with a reasonable expectation that it will print just as you want it to. 62-1/2 gazillion .pdf files can't all be wrong.

Acrobat started out just fine, versions up till 5 were great, nice and fast, not too many gimmicks.

Then version 6 came along.

And that is where they messed up.

As for the world of the "non geek", I am a huge user of PDF files, and have probably created many hundreds of thousands of documents myself, my own office is completely paperless and documents are fed into HP Digital senders to turn them into PDF files, and I have servers that do nothing but store our PDF files, but Adobe better be careful or the era of the PDF will be over.

Slightly OT, but oh well here goes:

Why does my Acrobat take a LOT longer to load a document with Firefox vs. than with IE? It seems to take forever to load, and also forever to close the window once I am done reading. IE is quick and smooth (oddly enough!). Anybody else have this issue?

Slightly OT, but oh well here goes:

Why does my Acrobat take a LOT longer to load a document with Firefox vs. than with IE? It seems to take forever to load, and also forever to close the window once I am done reading. IE is quick and smooth (oddly enough!). Anybody else have this issue?

What version of Acrobat are you running ?
What OS are you running ?
What version of Firefox/IE are you running?

From the onset there's no real reason why this would occur, but that's not saying I've seen it before.

Which one of the two is set as your default browser ? As stupid as it sounds, I'm guessing that your default browser is loading the pdf quicker than the non-preferred.

I had this problem while printing the manual for my Yamaha receiver not to long ago. Certain images were causing problems. I think I solved the problem by printing as an image. I can't seem to find that option in Acrobat 6 but that's what I did and it worked.

A while back I stumbled across a neat way to speed up the Acrobat load times. Basically when Acrobat loads, it also loads a bunch of other crap that it doesn't need and just slows down your computer. Here is how to speed it up:

1. Go to C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 6.0\Reader
2. Create a new folder called plug_ins_disabled.
3. Move all files from the plug_ins folder to the plug_ins_disabled folder EXCEPT EWH32.api, printme.api, and search.api.
4. You're done.

More info here http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=20055

A while back I stumbled across a neat way to speed up the Acrobat load times. Basically when Acrobat loads, it also loads a bunch of other crap that it doesn't need and just slows down your computer. Here is how to speed it up:

1. Go to C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 6.0\Reader
2. Create a new folder called plug_ins_disabled.
3. Move all files from the plug_ins folder to the plug_ins_disabled folder EXCEPT EWH32.api, printme.api, and search.api.
4. You're done.

More info here http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=20055

Or, just install this:

http://fileforum.betanews.com/detail/1069854583/1

Acrobat 7 seems to load MUCH faster than previous versions when a PDF is linked through from a browser...

Free 7.0 reader is now available at: http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html

Acrobat 7 seems to load MUCH faster than previous versions when a PDF is linked through from a browser...

I hope so! Willing to uinstall 6 and try 7. Acrobat Reader 6 was just a piece of garbage. I totally agree with the other posters. It took forever to load from Web pages and that's if it didn't completely crash and take the browser with it.

Update: Acrobat Reader 7.0 is definitely much faster than 6.0 and hasn't hung up on anything I've used thus far in my limited tests. Users should definitely uninstall 6.0 first and then give 7.0 a try.

I made sure to unclick all the options and not download the full program, toolbar, and extras. I also chose not to use d/l manager as I prefer to d/l the .exe in its entirety. W/O all the options the 7.0 reader file is about 12.6MB compared to the whopping 20+MB with options. What a pig!

7 also has the setting to not open it within your browser. 6 also had the setting but it actually works with 7.

Whatever they did to 7 to make it load faster than 6 seems to be platform-independent. I've noticed the same thing on my Mac.