Adobe Corporation recently introduced the latest version of their PDF reader application, Adobe Reader X.
So I promptly downgraded my Adobe Reader 9 installation to Adobe Reader 8.
I use PDF documents very often. Apparently, the good folks at Adobe do not. Why else would they remove one of the most important productivity features, namely the ability to view several PDF files in the same application window?
Yes, I get it: for new users, it makes sense to move away from the “applications open documents” paradigm towards the “documents appear in windows” paradigm. In an ideal world, the application would be invisible; each document would exist in its own window; and we wouldn’t even care that some documents are Word files, others are PDFs, etc.
But we don’t live in an ideal world, and there are reasons to suspect that this ideal world may never come to pass. Perhaps it will. But it’s not here at present, and the fact that every PDF opens in a new window is a huge annoyance.
An annoyance that was first introduced in version 9, and is apparently being kept alive in version X. However, my patience ran out. It’s back to version 8 for me.
Oh, and I also have a license of Acrobat Pro, to produce and edit PDF files. But, it’s a license for version 6. Why? Because version 6 was the last version without DRM/Activation.
If folks from Adobe read this, well, please let me know when you have a version of Acrobat that is DRM-free and can do MDI. Then, I’ll buy. Until then, I’ll just stick to my obsolete versions.