Adobe Reader X Gotcha

I completed my review and copyedit of the layout PDF for the February issue of Realms of Fantasy magazine; this will be the first issue under new owners Damnation Books.

I had just installed Adobe Reader X (aka Version 10), which complicated the process, because I had never used this version before for editing. I had worked about three hours on the layout, highlighting many (many) words and sections of text and, where appropriate, inserting comments; highlighting and comments are new with Reader X. At one point I saved my work but it appeared that Reader had crashed: the entire Save screen had grayed out, and there was no moving hourglass, no "working" text, no "saving" text; nothing to indicate that the app was indeed doing its thing correctly. So after about fifteen or so seconds of this, I hit the ole Ctrl-Alt-Delete sequence of keys and killed the program. I reopened the file and all my work was gone; I was looking at the original unmarked PDF; three hours at least of work lost. I tried various combinations of Save, like saving under a new file name, but the Save screen continued to go all gray. Finally I tried another Save and decided to just let the app run its course, with hopes that a Reader-specific error message would appear that I could research. After more than thirty seconds the all-gray Save screen closed and all was well with the world; the PDF had been saved. No problems, no errors, no crash.

It turns out that the only real problem here is the poorly designed Adobe Reader X user interface (UI) -- and the fact that the Save process takes exceedingly long. Had I been given some kind of indication that the program was working, I wouldn't have killed the file and lost all my work. (Plus, I tend to be impatient, alas....) Granted, I should have Saved the work earlier, so that's on me; yet I still don't understand why the built-in autosave didn't work, and why there was no autosaved file to restore.

The other issue I have with Reader X is that the user cannot customize the toolbar. So I do a lot of advanced searches and every time I need to do this, I must use the Edit menu to select Advanced Search, or enter the key combination Shift-Ctrl-F -- not an easy combination of keys to select in that order with one hand.

Bottom line: user beware; this is a heads up on the Save process should you upgrade to Adobe Reader X, and also to be prepared for the not-so-friendly UI.

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