I just switched a friend over to the Macintosh platform. Love it, hate it, I don’t really care. 😛 He’s been loving it in any event which is what matters. There have been a few things that we’ve needed to tweak though to get all the same functionality of his old Windows XP system that is running some very archaic proprietary software. I wish I could call out the developer of this particular package because it’s absolutely one of the worst coding disasters I have EVER seen. This piece of garbage is a perfect example of what happens when a developer tries to reimplement the GUI from the ground up without using mature APIs/SDKs. He thought he could do it better…
Stepping back off my soapbox, my friend’s work flow involved using this program to draw a wire frame type of drawing for purpose of design and bidding. After that, he would print to PDF with CutePDFWriter and then use CutePDFPro to annotate the PDF and modify it in all of the ways that the software that generated the drawing could not. Here is where the problem came in. It was extremely baffling and annoying.
We are running Windows XP on his new Mac in a Parallels virtual machine. This is great because he can patch his system, install all the necessary programs he needs and then freeze a snapshot of it so he can always roll back to a known good state. Being the minimalist I am, I was trying to keep his new VM extremely clean so it would perform in tip top shape. When it came time to replicate his old setup, we install the crappy custom CAD program, then we installed CutePDF Pro and CutePDF Writer. Now when he would attempt to open a PDF in CutePDF Pro, there was a big problem. The file would instantly bring up ANOTHER dialog that said “file download”. It would have the options to open, save or cancel and pre-populated was a temp file sort of name with some letter and numbers.pdf. If you hit save, it would save it where you specified and repeat that loop with a new temp file name with incremented numbers. This went on and on and on. I didn’t know what could possibly be wrong so I turned to tech support (last resort, right?) CutePDF provides only email support so I sent in the request and forgot about it. I came back to solve this problem 2 weeks later. Apparently they did end up answering the email but he didn’t notice.
I screwed around with the problem for another couple hours and then finally was going to reinstall so I searched his email for CutePDF to find his product key and saw that they had answered our plea for support. The solution was simple but completely baffling to me:
“Dear Sir, Please install Adobe Reader 9.0. That will solve your problem”
WHAT?!? Are you kidding me? Of course I tried it and it worked like a charm. Everything was flawless and back as it should be. Why though? This strikes me the same as if you purchased Apple’s answer to Microsoft Office, iWork but when you went to run it, it told you, “Please install Microsoft Office to continue this operation”.
I mean, am I wrong to think that some people use alternatives like CutePDF Writer and Foxit Editor perhaps because they hate Adobe with a passion or if not, perhaps because they may be lighter weight applications that use less system resources and may run better on older hardware? Having your competitor’s product be a critical requirement for your application to function correctly seems to be a bizarre business choice for me.
I tried to Google around for solutions to this issue and I’m fairly shocked now that I found out what the problem is that more people don’t have the same complaint. </rant>
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Enter your comments here…
OMG!!! I experienced something similar and tried “your solution” and it worked. I have been happily using Cutepdf Pro on my Windows 7 (i know, i know…still on a pc!) with no hitches. I had even changed my default settings so that pdfs would open automatically with Cutepdf instead of Adobe. Everything was going fine until about a week ago when I needed to download and open something from a Web site and got the message that I had to download Adobe Reader X 10.0. I obliged and from then on suddenly for no reason halfway through a day of work I would no longer be able to open any pdf with either program! This went on every day until today I couldn’t take it any more so my son suggested that we just get rid of Adobe. Well, we couldn’t! At least not until we got rid of Cutepdf Pro first! Every time we tried to uninstall Adobe we would get a message screen that said we had to close Cutepdf Pro first. Only IT WASN’T OPEN! So he uninstalled Cutepdf and then Adobe. Then, of course, we had to reinstall Cutepdf. And that’s when things got really weird! Every time I tried to open a pdf file Cutepdf would open on the screen and then 2 small error message screens started flashing like strobe lights!! And the file wouldn’t open! I went in to check my default settings for opening pdf files and…the pdf extension WAS NOT AN OPTION!! That’s when I went on a search on Google to see if anyone else had had a similar problem and that’s when I found your post. Thank God! I went online, chose to download the older version (9) of Adobe Reader and voila! Cutepdf is back to working like a charm. Unbelievable!!!
I’m glad to have helped someone else with this post. I REALLY didn’t think I was the only one out there who had ran into this. If Adobe Reader is a dependency of CutePDF Pro, CutePDF Pro should NOT allow you to install without already having Reader on your system. The whole thing still boggles my mind. I’d love to hear from anyone else who is running into this issue. 🙂
I started having this problem when I “upgraded” to Adobe Reader X. I figured it had something to do with Adobe “sandboxing” the new version.
So, I went back to CutePDF’s website and looked for the system requirements. It states: “Works with Acrobat Reader 5.0 and higher, or any other PDF viewer. Does not require the full version of Adobe Acrobat to run.”
OK, I’ll switch to Sumatra PDF (the reader I use on my other computers), I figured. It doesn’t work with it either.
Yeah I’d figure Sumatra wouldn’t do the trick. You might be right about the sandboxing feature interfering but if that’s the case, the CutePDF guys must be scrambling to get a workable solution to move forward with. My biggest frustration with this problem was that it did not fail gracefully. If Acrobat is a requirement for the program to start up, CutePDF Pro needs to check for the presence of Acrobat and give you a meaningful error message if it is not present.
I agree. At the very least, they could update their website to say “Works with Acrobat Reader 5.0 through 9.x.” It definitely doesn’t work with “any other PDF viewer”!
“If Acrobat is a requirement for the program to start up, CutePDF Pro needs to check for the presence of Acrobat and give you a meaningful error message if it is not present.”
Thank you! I was searching around for a while before I found this article – you made my morning.
I got a license of this product to test out, and ran into this issue on a machine with Reader X installed. It didn’t occur to me that they could have a dependency on Reader 5.0-9.x. And I certainly would never have known from the error message that doesn’t come up.
Also fun: It will happily use the full Acrobat 9 instead of Reader 9 if both are installed. That was worth a giggle on my end.
Yes, I agree a meaningful error would have saved all of us many hours… And you make a good point that it’s really not ideal to be dependent on an outdated version.
I don’t knw exactly when it started but when I try and open a pdf with CutePDF pro I get a message that says “Your current security settings do not allow this file to be downloaded”. It’s already on my hard drive so I’m not sure what’s going on. I removed Adobe 10 and installed 9 without success. I still have the error message comimg up. Does anyone have an idea? Thanks.
WTF!
Thanks for taking the time to post this, worked for me also with exactly the same problem.
I just purchased the Cutepdf Professional to get away from Adobe to only discover just like everyone else, Adobe is required. Big disappointment.
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