In trade school, one tip the lecturers always pushed was to never update to the latest software version straight away, but let others experience the problems first, then upgrade once the first patch became available.

This lesson was further reinforced this week when I received an email from Enfocus – the manufacturer of the Pitstop Professional plug-in for Adobe Acrobat.

Unfortunately for many Adobe Acrobat users, the software had already updated – usually without the operator’s knowledge – until the signs of problems presented themselves, and by then it was too late.

In my case, updating Acrobat is something I have to do manually, having learned the hard way what can happen when software – used in a production environment – is changed without warning and affects components of production. I did this by going to Acrobat’s preferences, navigating to updates, and unchecking the dialog box that says Automatically install updates.

What confuses matters is that Acrobat is considered part of Adobe’s Document Cloud more than it is in Adobe’s Creative Cloud – something that can be demonstrated by going into the Creative Cloud application looking at the items installed… or could simply be an unreported bug. In the following screenshot, it appears that my version is already updated.

But unlike the InDesign install that shows the version number, Acrobat DC’s version number isn’t displayed, so instead I choose to check for updates manually.

I’m now presented with a new dialog box that informs me that an update is available and if I would like to install it now. I decline and press the No button.

Unfortunately, my colleagues were not so lucky. I was originally aware that an update to Acrobat was available via Adobe’s replies to my earlier posts in the Acrobat.Uservoice.

Instead, I was fielding questions from my colleagues concerning a previously unseen bug in Acrobat concerning “why can’t I see what I’ve selected?”.

The issue that is caused for Mac users

The fault concerns the Enfocus Pitstop Pro plugin for Adobe Acrobat on Mac only in the 21.007.20091 install; and has to do with items selected using Enfocus’ select tool are not highlighted (see this link for Enfocus’ own description). In the following example, the text in the left hand column has been selected using the pre-patch version.

And here is how the same selection appears in the 21.007.20091 version.

It isn’t a catastrophic failure of the software, but it’s certainly frustrating and will make tasks much harder for operators until this issue is resolved.

So who fixes this?

Another lesson I’m still yet to fully appreciate is not to post bug reports to social media sites such as Twitter, like I did in this instance. I’d posted to both Enfocus and Adobe Acrobat in case neither team knew of the issue.

To the Acrobat team’s credit, the response was within five minutes of the tweet, though the next few tweets were trying to act as support. It’s just an educated guess here, but it is my belief that the social media team who manage these posts don’t actually use the software, and that’s fine – I’m simply reporting the issue and not trying to troubleshoot the issue over Twitter.

In Enfocus’ email from Andrew Bailes-Collins, the Senior Product Manager, he states “We have reported the issue to Adobe, and are in discussion with their engineers on how to resolve the issue. Please be assured that we will resolve this issue as soon as possible. When there is a fix, we will let you know via email.”

What now?

This post isn’t to point criticism at either Enfocus or Adobe as I’m aware that not everything can be tested during software development. I too am a software developer and from time to time have had to change or modify scripts on Colecandoo due to a change in how Adobe InDesign now works with the scripts I’ve written. Similarly, I test as much as I can, but have had issues with some scripts such as “It doesn’t work in my language version of InDesign”.

What I would find beneficial would be for the Acrobat team to change the updating preferences in Acrobat to be an “opt-in” rather than an “opt-out”; and to also integrate the Acrobat DC updating into Creative Cloud so that the version number can be seen; and that Creative Cloud can alert to the updates, rather than happening automatically or having to manually check from time to time. What would also be handy is the ability to roll-back to the pre-patch version – something that we have been unable to do in this instance.