We all hate losing work on a computer. And yet it continues to happen, through crashes, momentary incompetence, or glitches. Which is why a lot of software companies do their level best to ensure that this happens a little as possible, or that files can be recovered when they fall apart.
Which is why I'm a little worried about some behaviour I've been finding in Acrobat 9. One of the big draws of the latest couple of versions of Adobe's PDF creating software is the ability to do a shared review, where - by uploading the file to a central server - a bunch of users can write and reply to comments on the document to get it ready for final production. It's a fantastic idea, and far better than the old approach of emailing everyone a copy of the file, and trying to hold further discussions over email, compiling all the comments and finally working out what to do.
But here's the problem: with Acrobat 9.x, you must have a copy of Reader 9.x to get this feature to work. If you're working in Reader 8.x, a dialogue box pops up when you open the file to tell you this.
And then it goes away, and the commenting and online review tools all appear, exactly as you'd expect.
Great, you think. Maybe it will work after all, and the problem was exaggerated. So you blithely go through, add a few comments, ask for a margin to be reduced or a graphic sharpened. And you hit the "Publish Comments" button. Nothing much seems to happen, but hey - all the comments are there, right?
Except that the guy who sent out the review can't see them. He calls you up, asking you to upgrade to Reader 9 - which you do. You open up the file again, and suddenly BAM! - all the comments are gone. Reader 9, it seems, opens the file, talks to the server, and - seeing there are no comments - syncs your file to the file on the server.
It does beg the question: if you'll lose all the annotations you've made when you upgrade to the correct version of the software, why does it even allow users to make them? Why not just have a flag in the file that says: if opened in Reader 8 or below, disable commenting features?
I'm quite surprised that this hasn't been noticed yet, or fixed - perhaps it's not such a bad problem as I thought, and the other comments are recoverable. But software shouldn't give you such a heart attack moment, I'm sure.
Anyway, I'm going to go back to trying to find a more elegant solution!
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