Changing Identity in Adobe Acrobat Professional Isn’t Impossible!

Adobe Acrobat Professional is one of the important SEO tools we use in the office, but it can be frustrating as hell. I ran into one particular bugaboo today when preparing a web page review for a client.

The problem? You can’t change your identity in Acrobat Professional, so all of your comments appear under your Windows login name instead of a name that’s appropriate for your document. You can see at this Adobe Acrobat Professional forum that this problem has stumped the pros.

So if you whimsically login as “huggybear” on your computer, every comment you create in Adobe Acrobat Professional is going to show up as huggybear. Not so hot when you’re trying to impress those humorless clients from Chicago.

It’s Not Your Acrobat Identity – It’s Your Author Name

SEO wunderkind Brian heard about my problem and assured me it could be fixed. “Sure,” I told him. “I’m uninstalling Adobe Acrobat Professional right now, and I’m going to change my Windows login name before I reinstall it.”

So I went off and did my Adobe Acrobat Professional install/reinstall mambo. No joy. Apparently Acrobat was emotionally attached to my original Windows login name (no, it’s not huggybear), and it wasn’t letting go.

Since I work at a search engine marketing company, I resorted to “the Google” and turned up the aforementioned Adobe Acrobat forum, replete with frustrated Acrobat users. No joy.

How to Change the Name on Your Adobe Acrobat Professional Comments

So finally I had Brian come over to my workstation and whack on Adobe Acrobat for awhile. It was a pain to figure out which prefs needed to be edited but it is doable.

First, go to Edit > Preferences > Commenting and uncheck “Always use Log-in Name for Author name.” This means that Adobe Acrobat’s no longer going to use that original huggybear identity name anymore.

Great. Now where the heck is the Author name changed? Well, of course, Adobe managed to hide this deep in the bowels of Acrobat Professional.

First, create a new comment. Right-click on it to bring up the Sticky Note Properties and click on the General tab. There! The author name!

And yet we’re still not done. Before you close the dialog box, you MUST hit the “Make Properties Default” checkbox at the bottom. That will apply the Author Name to all of your Adobe Acrobat Professional comments, rather than just this single instance. Nice UI design, Adobe.

So there you go, people. You can’t change your identity in Adobe Acrobat Professional — but you can change the name that appears on all of your Acrobat Professional comments. Thanks, Brian!

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This entry was posted on Monday, May 5th, 2008 at 4:54 pm and is filed under SEO tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.