Acobat 8 versus Visio 2003 Acobat 8 versus Visio 2003

I was recently testing out Acrobat 8, and for the most part, it worked quite well. I created three .pdf files from Visio 2003 files, and then one .pdf from those three, sorting the pages as I needed to. Some of the Visio files were landscape and some portrait. Nevertheless, I could rotate just the landscape files, resulting in a .pdf containing only portrait pages. Then, I applied a dozen different backgrounds to the generated .pdf to generate a dozen or so unique files of Visio drawings, which were then successfully submitted as parts of patent applications to the USPTO.

However, Acrobat 8 (professional) has a very nasty habit when coupled with Visio 2003 - it constantly overrides the Visio button and menu bars in order to make sure that its own button bar and menu items are persistent. So, I will set up the button bars and menus like I want in Visio. It will run just fine, until I exit. Then, when I restart Visio, Acrobat has reset the Visio button bars and menus to their initial state and added buttons and menu items for itself.

I wasn't absolutely positive that it was an Acrobat problem until today. But my 30 day Acrobat 8 test license is expired and I managed to uninstall it (not without having to reboot both before and afterwards). And guess what? Visio is running great - remembering button bars and menus across program executions.

What is interesting here is that Acrobat 8 tries to do the same thing with the rest of Office 2003, but doesn't screw the rest of the programs up this way. The button bar and menu customization, etc. look the same across all these Microsoft products, but apparently isn't, since Acrobat only screws up Visio.

Nevertheless, I am hesitant to purchase and install Acrobat 8 for just this reason.