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Well, Bill Swallow (thanks Bill!) was the only one to respond to my message
regarding overriding user settings in Acrobat Reader (I had a pdf file in
which I wanted it to auto-advance every 5 seconds; this couldn't work
because unless the user manually went into their copy of Acrobat and set it
to auto-advance, it just sat still on the first page). Why? Becuase the
settings you set in Acrobat are (for some odd reason) not related to the
document in any way. They're just related to your own copy of Acrobat on
your own machine.
Bill suggested I try to include a copy of the reader on the CD, which was a
good idea--only I couldn't configure the copy I deployed to keep the
settings either.
So, the bottom line is that it couldn't be done. I cannot BELIEVE that Adobe
doesn't have a way to do this. I am completely shocked. BTW, I confirmed my
belief that Adobe's help files and knowledge base are almost completely
useless. Several times, I would *almost* get an answer, come so close, and
then that would be the end of the topic. No links to other related topics,
no nothing. Their help is a really good example of really bad help, IMO.
Even if it had just told me something like "these are the only settings you
can specify, don't bother trying to set other options" that would have been
fine. But they would allude to things and then give no further info.
whatsoever. For example, it would say something like "there are some
preferences that you can set to override the user's settings" but would give
no explanation whatsoever what those preferences are or where to find more
info. about it. Just terrible!
Anyway, thanks for letting me vent. I was very surprised that no other tech
writers (besides Bill) had ever run into this issue before!
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A landmark hotel, one of America's most beautiful cities, and
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IPCC 01, Oct. 24-27 in Santa Fe. http://ieeepcs.org/2001/
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