Acrobat Reader

I was looking through some old notes of mine, from back in the day, when I was supporting large user groups, working at a large unnamed danish company. So I figured that would do a short post with some of these things. Partly to have the notes in one place, secondly to clean up my computer – but mainly cause someone out there might find it useful. Share the knowledge! Here we go….

Problems starting Acrobat: The Font Cache

I have found that certain issue with the Adobe Font Cache LST file, can prevent the application from working properly (or at all). I realized that deleting the Font cache will trigger the application to re-build it on the next run – thus having no negative effekt on the program, making this a quick and dirty first-attempt-blind-troubleshooting for problems with Acrobat & Acrobat Reader. The file in questions is called AcroFnt<version>.lst, where <version> is the Acrobat version number. So for example: AcroFnt11.lst. It’s located under: For older versions of Windows, its under: As you can probably tell. These example are for Adobe Reader XI (i.e. version 11). You can just modify location and filename if you have an older or newer version. Or you can create a batch file which just deletes all relevant variations. So that way – if you have a machine with Acrobat / Adobe Reader that is causing problems. Try this first. Crude, yes. But effective, as is will fix some issues with little effort on your part.

Wont open attachments

By default Adobe Reader has some security measures in place to prevent users from carelessly opening, say, an attached .zip file – just in case it would contain containing something maleficent. This list can be modify via the registry: in a key named: tBuiltInPermList This key contains a pipe delimited list of extensions and a corresponding integer value. If the integer is set to 3 it means that the extension is NOT allowed. If set to 1 it IS allowed. So you simply have to change the value from 3 to 1 for your favorite extensions. Below is what I have (Adobe Reader XI)… I goes without saying that this present a security issue if you’re not careful. Modify at your own peril.