My Acrobat Pro Default Settings
There are a lot of settings in Acrobat Pro that can be customized. The default settings of the program are often not the best for the work you do.
Sometimes an update will change a default setting from what you had previously, and sometimes you might not even have known that such a setting existed. Fortunately, you can change the default settings to your personal preference. I'm going to list some of my personal default settings and explain why I have them set the way I do. While my settings may not be the right settings for you, I trust that you will gain a better understanding of Acrobat Pro and how it can be customized to improve your workflow.
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The Number One Setting You Should Check Immediately
In my opinion, Adobe recently made a huge blunder by completely changing the Acrobat Pro user interface (UI) without reason or consultation. To make matters worse they snuck this extreme makeover into an update without warning, leaving thousands of loyal customers scrambling and struggling to regain productivity. You can read about it here.
If you do not see the following menu items at the top of your Acrobat program then you've either been an unwitting victim of this corporate blunder, a recent purchaser of the software who doesn't know any different, or the one person who loves the change and immediately relearned processes and muscle memory acquired over decades in a relative short period of time:Â
File Edit View E-Sign Window Help
If you don't see these menu items, what you will probably see instead is one item simply called Menu. Click that and select Disable new Acrobat and you'll be back in business. I really hope Adobe comes to their senses and scraps this new UI otherwise all the articles, videos, and tutorials written about Acrobat Pro to date will be totally irrelevant. And individuals and organizations the world over will scramble to restore custom automation tools on which they have come to rely.
Edit > Preferences
Selecting Preferences from the Edit menu (or Ctrl + k on a Windows keyboard) will open a window with over 30 categories of settings. I will examine settings in the following categories:
Documents
General
Forms
Identity
JavaScript
Security (Enhanced)
Updater
I will also describe how to set default settings for form fields and annotations.
Documents
1)      On the Acrobat menu under File at the bottom you will see the last five PDFs you accessed. In some previous versions of Acrobat there was a setting to display between five and 10 recent files in this list. With Acrobat Pro, under the five recent files you will see View All Recent Files. This setting in preferences lets you set the number of recent files up to a maximum of 100. The list of these files can also be viewed in the Home tab.
2)      This sets the number of minutes between the intervals for automatic saving of the changes. This can save you a lot of lost work if you experience a hard shutdown of Acrobat, including one caused by a power outage, because you will be able to recover your work up to the last automatic save.
General
1)Â Â Â I don't use online storage when saving files, so I unchecked this box to save me some clicks when saving.
2)   The concept of viewing different files in separate tabs was introduced in Acrobat with the DC version. This concept is similar to the tabs you would see in a web browser but instead of different web pages you would view different PDF files. I did not like this feature at first but now I love it. It was simply a matter of getting used to the change. I can now work on several files at once and toggle between them by simply clicking the tabs or pressing Ctrl + Tab.
3)   I always found it annoying to be asked "Do you want to close all tabs or the current tab?" Of course I want to close all tabs, that's why I'm shutting down Acrobat and not the current tab, and that's why I don't have this box checked. I guess it's all about flexibility and personal preferences. By the way, the first time you get that annoying question I referenced above, if you check the box that says "Always close all tabs" it will uncheck the preferences box for you. Here's another tip. The keystroke shortcut to close down Acrobat is Ctrl + Q. In case you couldn't tell by now, I have a keystroke shortcut addiction.
Email
The first time you email a PDF using Acrobat you will be prompted to set up your preferred email account, or you can set it up here in preferences. I use my default email account which is a desktop version of Microsoft Outlook.
Forms
1)   I suffered for over two years with a new "feature" in Acrobat Pro before I discovered how to turn it off. While editing, I'm either working on form fields in field editing mode ("Prepare Form"), or I'm editing text in editing mode, but never both at the same time. One of the tricks I use to select multiple form fields is to hold down the mouse button and drag the cursor across those fields. Before Acrobat Pro DC (now named Acrobat Pro) it was never an issue. With DC it would not allow me to do that because as soon as I clicked anywhere on the page to drag the mouse the program would detect all of the text on every page to allow text editing. This would slow me down and it was extremely annoying. I found this setting by chance one day and the box has never been checked since.
2)   Prior to DC, there was a purple ribbon at the top of the page under the toolbar to "highlight fields". I don't like this setting unless I want to see where all the fields are located. I have never kept the fields highlighted by default, but a lot of people seem to do that. I don't know whether it's a default setting or not, but as you can see in the image above, I do not have the check box selected. You can also change the color of the highlighting by using the color picker. If you decide to experiment with different colors, I recommend recording the default color settings as it might be difficult to return to the original color without a record of the settings. There are no security restrictions for setting the highlighting. In other words, you can create a script in a form that will turn highlighting on or off. When this script is executed, it actually changes the setting on the user's application, not just on the current form containing the script.
Identity
The purpose of the identity object is to pull user information into dynamic stamps, comments, and digital signatures. The first time you use a dynamic stamp you will be prompted to complete the identity fields if you haven't done so already. You can complete them by selecting the identity category in preferences. The identity fields can be completed manually with the exception of Login Name. The Login Name is the computer login and can't be changed. It is also the default author for comments.Â
All of the identity field values can be called from a script, but Title and Organizational Unit are not documented, meaning you won't be able to find the property names in Adobe's JavaScript documentation, and if you run a script in the console to find all of the identity property names it won't display those two:
for (i in identity)
{console.println(i)}I obtained the undocumented identity fields by guessing and trial & error:
identity.title (Title)
identity.department (Organizational Unit)
JAVASCRIPT
Enable Acrobat JavaScript should be selected. If it is not selected, you will be prompted to enable JavaScript as soon as a script tries to run in a document. Enable global object security policy should also be selected. This allows access to the global object across different PDFs. This is crucial for automation processes involving multiple PDFs where global variables are used.
I recommend using an external JavaScript editor instead of the Acrobat JavaScript editor. The built-in JavaScript editor does not have enough space for long scripts that Ive developed, especially those containing popup dialog windows. Any plain text editor can be substituted by browsing to the .exe file that launches the program. I use Notepad as my JavaScript editor.
Security (Enhanced)
In this category, under Sandbox Protections is a box called Enable protected mode at startup. Checking this box prevents access to the file system without user interaction. As PDF automation specialists we are running scripts every day that require access to the file system without further user interaction. If you are running any type of PDF automation that access different files on the file system, this box should NOT be selected. You will have to restart Acrobat for a change in this setting to take effect.
Updater
There is only one setting in this category, "Automatically install updates". There are pros and cons to having this default setting box checked. The benefit is never having to worry about your software being out-of-date. This benefit might be outweighed by the fact that updates will run without warning, and it might not be at the most convenient time. Once the update starts you won't be able to use the program until the update is completed. There's nothing worse than being in the middle of a webinar or screen sharing demonstration and having to pause what you're doing until the update is finished. There is no message to tell you the update is finished either. There's only a message that an update is in progress when you attempt to use the program. This is one setting I go back and forth on. I leave it on but try to remember to turn it off before starting anything in which I have an audience.
Form Field Defaults
It doesn’t seem to be well known that you can set all field property defaults for each type of form field. When using the Acrobat UI to create form fields their properties will automatically use the defaults set by you. There is a simple two-step process to this:
1) In form editing mode, set the desired properties.
2) Right-click the field and select Use Current Properties as New Defaults.
Remember, this only changes the defaults for that particular field type (example: text, check box, radio button, etc.) You will have to set defaults for each field type if you want to change them.
Some of My Personal Form Field Defaults
1) Fill Color - My default fill color is no fill color (NOT white) for every type of field. When creating forms I use the underlying graphics to create the look for all fields. I don’t want any fill color covering up the graphics. If I need a fill color I will set it after the fact for the particular field(s).
2) Button Layout - I mostly use buttons with icons for the face, so I set my button field layout default to Icon only. If I need something different I will change it after the fact.
3) Check Box Style - I prefer check marks to X’s so I set my check box style default to Check. There are several styles. The X style is called Cross.
4) Text Field Text Size - My default text size is always set to auto, instead of a specific font size. This means the text will shrink to fit the field as the end user types. I adjust the size of my text fields to produce a specfic text size when the font size is set to auto, and adjust the field size for each form. This way the fields still display a specific text size, but if there is not enough room for the text that is entered, it will shrink instead of getting cut off.
Keep in mind that field size is also one of the default settings. I have a default size for each type of field. If I’m going to be creating a lot fields that are signficantly smaller or larger than my default, I will temporarily change my default field size to accommodate the current project and try to remember to change it back when finished. This goes for other properties as well like fill color, text color, text font, etc.
Annotation Default Settings
As with form fields, there are default settings for each type of annotation, a.k.a. comments/markups (Square, Highlight, etc.). The annotation size is not usually a default because either the markups are drawn by dragging the mouse, the size can’t be changed, or the size is set from an image in the case of a stamp. There three simple steps to changing the defaults:
1) Right-click the annotation and select Properties.
2) Change the properties to the desired settings.
3) Either select the check box Make Properties Default before clicking OK, OR, right-click the annotation and select Make Current Properties Default.
Thank you for reading. Please leave a comment if you have questions. See you next time…