How-to Articles for Adobe Acrobat Reader 7

Download a smaller (and faster) version of Acrobat reader.

Don't download from the Adobe site or any other web page. Go directly to the Adobe FTP and get the 12MB package (unless you want the big fat package with the Yahoo Companion and lots of other garbage.) The file you want is AdbeRdr70_enu.ex.

 

How to hide the Yahoo! toolbar item and the Search The Internet menu item

Use an application-level JavaScript to hide the Yahoo! toolbar and the Search The Internet menu item. Using a text editor such as Notepad or TextEdit, copy and paste the following four lines of code into a new text file:

//This hides the Yahoo toolbarbutton. app.hideToolbarButton("WebSearchView"); //This hides the menu item View>Toolbars>Search the Internet app.hideMenuItem("ShowHideToolbarWebSearchView");

Save this file to your Acrobat or Adobe Reader JavaScript folder:

Note: Make sure the file extension is .js (for example, NoYahoo.js)

On Windows, the JavaScript folder is normally located in C:/Program Files/Adobe/Acrobat 7/Reader/Javascripts. Your install path may differ.

 

How to disable the Search The Internet button in the Search pane

There is a "Search the internet using Yahoo!" hyperlink at the bottom of the Search pane. You can't hide or remove the hyperlink, but you can disable the Search The Internet button in the Search panel:

1. Navigate to the Adobe Reader JavaScript folder (see above for folder location).

2. Rename the Websearch.js file located in the JavaScript folder to Websearch.old.

 

How to remove the banner ad in the top right corner

You will probably notice a small banner ad in the top right corner. To remove that, just Open the full Acrobat Reader (not the browser plug-in) and go to Edit->Preferences->Startup and uncheck the item labeled "Show messages and automatically update".

 

Avoid tying up RAM

One downside to using the browser plug-in is that when you open a PDF link in your browser, Acroread.exe stays in memory. You can kill the process or start and exit the full app to pull it from memory. If that's too much of a pain, I recommend that you just tell Acrobat to launch the full app rather than the browser plug-in. To do this, start the full Acrobat Reader, go to Edit->Preferences->Internet and uncheck the box labeled "Display PDF in browser". This solves the memory problem and I think makes for a generally better user experience.

 

The Need For Speed

If the speed improvements with Acrobat 7 aren't enough for you (it really is faster) then you can gain even more performance by moving unused Acrobat Reader plugins. To do this, go to your install directory, probably something like C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 7.0\Reader and just move the unnecessary plugins from the \plug_ins directory to the \Optional directory. To learn more about which plugins you may or may not need, you can check out Help->About Adobe Plug-Ins, and get a pretty good description of each one and what it does. Test Acrobat after each change and if you receive an error then move that file back.

 

How to reduce the system startup load.

Adobe installs a quick start item in your Startup folder. This is not required and the reader starts up quite  fast without it so do yourself and your RAM a favor.  Remove the "Adobe Reader Speed Launch" from Start->All Programs->Startup.