ES4 - No PDF Preview?

[ScottDM]

I found a number of threads on this reaching back two or more years, but no definitive answer.

I have a newly installed LCD ES4.

I  have made sure the Adobe Reader add-on is enabled in IE.

Reader DC is installed. (I can also install Acrobat Pro XI if needed).

Still, the PDF Preview (F5) command is greyed out under View.

Any ideas?

Thanks.

[MinusZero]

I have this come up periodically at my work place, so much so I wrote the solution so i wouldnt forget. I use ES2 and Acrobat Pro X.

The solution for me was to do a repair install on Acrobat Pro X. When that was done, the preview worked again.

[ScottDM]

Interesting.

I've used ES2 for many years and never had the problem. It happened immediately upon installing ES4.

Seems to me that LCD should not rely on Acrobat being installed; I have not seen that mentioned in any system requirements.

So even though I have Acrobat 10 and 11 available, at this point I'm trying to get a plain vanilla LCD ES4 to behave properly by itself.

Thanks,

Scott.

[MinusZero]

No problem. Mine is part of the Design Standard CS6 package. Because of the way i solved this, it makes me wonder if for previewing it is a requirement. Maybe previewing even works with Reader?

[ScottDM]

I have Reader DC installed, which of course everyone can get.

Like I said, I have not read anything that indicates Acrobat is a requirement for PDF preview with LCD.

I might take this up with Adobe Support.

Scott.

[ScottDM]

This is makin' me crazy.

Uninstalled ES4 and went back to ES3. PDF preview is greyed out there too!

Guess I'm going all the way back to ES2.   :-{

[ScottDM]

I’m now not surprised that I didn’t get much help here with this one. This is clearly a difficult and unusual case, although IMO there is nothing unusual about how I use Adobe software; the machine is less than two months old and I am not in any way a complex “power user”.

I spent 15 minutes with Adobe’s level 1 support, and then over 1.5 hours with an experienced and competent level 2 analyst. He manually deleted all traces of Adobe products, over 100,000 files, and cleared all registry items. Then he reinstalled everything, checked for PDF integration with IE which apparently is important, but the problem still persisted. Go figure.

He is going to call me back on Monday for further investigation, but meanwhile I bit the bullet, re-formatted C:, re-built the entire OS and app collection, and the problem is now fixed. Pretty drastic measures that most people would not want to do.

I have another machine with the same problem, so if he has new information on the root cause he can use that one.

I’ll pass on anything interesting that I learn.

[MinusZero]

Not too sure Adobe care much about non-subscription software anymore...there's money to be made. I still have unsolved problems with InDesign CS6 that have never been patched.

[ScottDM]

Yeah, I got the feeling that this guy wasn't in a position to report bugs to fix but was rather looking for a config change that would solve my problem.

What is the conventional wisdom around here about the future of LCD? The guy I dealt with implied it was being rolled into Adobe Experience Manager, but with the quick look that I gave it I couldn't see any of the depth that LCD has.

[MinusZero]

I havent looked into AEM forms but it does seem like there is movement towards making forms using HTML 5. The advantage is I think that they will then be able to be used on platforms where LCD dynamic forms cant be used. For me, Livecycle forms only work in Acrobat or Internet Explorer.

[ScottDM · Accepted solution]

So my Level 2 troubleshooter called me back this morning, after two days of what struck me as very thorough research on his part.

He explained that ES3 and 4 were not tested with Windows 10; they were both developed with the Windows 8 registry. Moreover, LCD is destined for sunset in favour of Adobe Experience Manager form development, so we can't expect much change in this regard.

Problems with LCD previews can occur with Windows 10 when saving to network drives, especially network drives that are synchronized for offline work. This is the case with my two laptops which have the same preview problem, and are both synced with the same Windows domain network.

So the solution is to not work with LCD files on network drives... stick to internal drives when working and then copy files to the network with File Explorer if needed.

[MinusZero]

Good stuff. Nice to find an answer to the problem.