Time to upgrade your Adobe Reader

If you regularly work with PDF documents, you’ve likely come up against some challenges.

It can be hard to fill in fields on a PDF form and then save it with that information intact, for instance.

Though this is easy to accomplish if you have Adobe Acrobat or one of several third-party PDF viewers, it’s difficult if you’re using the free Adobe Reader.

This is because PDFs were never meant to be savable using this particular program.

Clever marketing

Limiting Readers’ features was part of the company’s initial marketing strategy.

By making the free Reader the default PDF viewer for as many people as possible, it could then sell additional programs offering more features with ease.

Consider this example: a few years ago, Adobe added a feature to Acrobat Professional that allows users to “enable Reader rights” on forms.

This means a form can be created in Professional, and the rights can be enabled so users who open the form in Reader can save any changes made to its fields.

These forms can then be returned with filled-in data via email by users who only have access to the free Reader.

But there’s a catch. Adobe’s license agreement limits the number of recipients for the distribution of such forms. It also limits the number of times the data from these forms can be returned to the form’s creator.

Returned data refers to data returned in any format, including hard copies and faxed copies. As a result, the feature isn’t suitable for people posting forms to public websites or sending out mass emails.

Instead, it’s more useful for the transfer of data within organizations, where the number of users can be easily restricted.

Healthy competition

Adobe has other services that enable Reader rights for forms being used in excess.

However, these added offerings aren’t financially feasible for many organizations.

This is why competing alternatives to Adobe began to surface, and these other PDF programs allow form field values to be saved without having to enable any rights.

So, it was just a matter of time before Adobe also allowed forms to be savable with its Reader.

This day has finally arrived, as the company has released the Adobe Reader XI. If you haven’t yet upgraded, do so immediately.

Even if you use Acrobat, you should still upgrade your Reader since you can’t use Acrobat as a default viewer in a web browser.

After upgrading Reader, you’ll see the message pictured below on all PDF forms, rather than just on rights-enabled forms.

Don’t be quick to delete your other programs, though, because Adobe has removed new features in the past.