Home Forums Mac Software Mac Applications Adobe Reader 9.3.1 updater woes.

Does anyone know what's up with the latest (9.3.1) Adobe Reader updater? The standalone updater may not work at all (in Leopard I simply cannot point it to the Reader to be updated because it's dimmed), while the updater accessed via the Help menu only seems to work. Whatever I do on either PPC (10.4.11) or Intel (10.5.8) Mac, despite the updater saying it's successfully done, running it again makes it go through the same routine. The Get Info never budges from v. 9.3.0. Is it just me or what?

The updater worked for me in 10.6.2. What happens if you launch AR, go to the AR menu and click About Adobe Reader? Do you get the updated version number?

Like Jon, my updater worked as designed.

I hate to ask, but...

There are two Adobe Reader versions, a PPC and an Intel. Are you sure you are using the correct one?

Thanks for those replies! Yes I know of the separate updaters and they were downloaded separately on each Mac (PPC and Intel versions respectively) and applied properly. The About Reader info remains at 9.3.0 no matter how often I run the updater 'successfully' (as the concluding message proclaims); this appears to be noted by the updaters too, which offer themselves again when given the opportunity.

What makes this strange is the same result on two different Macs running two different versions of the OS. This is no proof the systems are not causing this themselves, but is at least suggestive of the possibility that something's wrong with the updaters. Hence my question here.

I'd like to once again point out that the stand-alone updaters (if they can applied at all: the Leopard one wouldn't) produced the same result as running the updater from within Reader via the Help menu.

I had the same problem with the 9.3.1 updater I downloaded from the Adobe site. I downloaded the updater from Version Tracker and the updater worked as intended. Both updaters appeared to have the same name but only the Version Tracker one worked.

The GetInfo window shows version 9.3.1 but the date modified shows January.

If musings are allowed...

1. Launch AR 9.1.2 and go to the Help Menu. Can you update/Check For Updates from there?

2. Apparently this problem is longstanding. There is even a thread on this problem on the Adobe Forum. While the thread title says 9.1.2, 9.1.3 is also discussed with possible solutions and workarounds.

Any and all musings are welcome! And yes, as I mentioned in my starting post I did run the updater from the Help menu (albeit in v. 9.3.0, which btw is required for this updater), but with the same negative result.

It's interesting that the Versiontracker download no longer redirects to Adobe, as I experienced when the updater was just posted day before yesterday. That one didn't work for me, but I'll try it again later today when I get back to the Macs in question. The next step would be to uninstall Reader entirely and reinstall the full 9.3.1 version.

And yes once again with regard to the (seemingly) longstanding character of this issue. I'm aware of that and remember thinking at the time that I must have been lucky to have missed those problems...

I agree with Harv. It does happen with Adobe. The latest update went on without any problem and the version check was OK (one PPC-Leopard; one Intel-SL). But the previous one run again from help menu hang close to the end for several minutes. But when I hit cancel and checked the version, it was correct. Is there any way you just trash your app and install a fresh copy?

As I mentioned above, that's the next step if the current VT download still won't work.

I ran the Intel updater. My Adobe Reader version number is now 9.3.1, but the creation and modification dates for the application remain unchanged, at 2/27/09.

Have you used a program like Monolingual to remove unnecessary language files, or done anything else which customizes the apps on your disk? Adobe updaters are notorious for not working if anything has modified the application bundle in any way. In such a case, the only solution I have found is to re-install the app and then run the updater.



Yep. The Adobe Acrobat apps are actually application bundles (packages) and the updater works by reaching directly inside the package and changing the files and resources within it. Mac OS X has a weird quirk that modifying or replacing the files within a folder will not change the modification date on the folder itself unless you use the Finder to do it (for example, if you use Word to replace a file in a folder, the folder's modification date won't change). Since application bundles are special cases of folders, when the Adobe updater changes the resources inside the package, the modification date that is shown for the application icon doesn't change.

It's something that drives me batty about OS X.

You can get to that Adobe page here.

Well, the updater now available from Versiontracker doesn't help, and looks and behaves just like the one I downloaded there 2 days ago, with one exception (on the PPC iMac): it now too asks you to navigate to the AR copy to be updated, which cannot be selected because it's dimmed. This also happened with the MBP running Leopard. The dimmed apps may reflect a permissions issue, but things look OK there regardless.

I have not done anything like removing unneeded languages as Tacit suggests, nor performed any of the other manipulations mentioned in the comments at the relevant Versiontracker and MacUpdate pages that might explain my problem, beyond installing previous full versions and updaters up to and including 9.3.0. All without any problems until now.

PS, somehow it looked to me this afternoon (on a Windows box) that the VT download was a direct one, instead of referring to the Adobe download page ('list'), but when I got home it appeared as I had seen it all along on Macs: as a 'list'. So I know how to get at the Adobe page(s), but hoped a direct link might perhaps produce better results.


UPDATE: removing the Adobe Reader 9.3.0 folder from Apps and running the same AR 9.3.0 installer as I ran about a month ago yielded an install that could be updated with the 9.3.1 updater on both iMac and MBP.

Thanks everyone for your suggestions!

Tacit,

Thank you for the detailed explanation of why the modification date on the Adobe Reader application bundle (I nearly wrote “bungle”) did not change. This seems counter-intuitive to me, and may lead some people to think that the updater failed. It could also pose a problem for a primitive backup program.

A little off but:
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9...says_researcher
They recommend not to use Adobe PDF browser plug-in; I never install it myself.

Thanks.

I use Preview whenever possible, after saving the Web page as a pdf using the option to do so in the Print dialog box of Safari (which makes pdf files with functioning links). There is a distinct problem with combining multiple pdf files into a single document with Preview, unless the page order is clear. I had quite a time combining the pages that make up this loudspeaker review:

Linn Majik 109 Loudspeaker

I have not heard the speaker.

I recently discovered another problem with Preview: it handles PDFs containing embedded fonts with non-standard encodings incorrectly.

If you open a PDF that contains a font that uses a custom encoding using Preview, and then save that PDF from Preview (even if you make absolutely no change to it at all), the font that contains the non-standard encoding becomes garbled in the PDF. This garbling can take several forms: the PDF may look correct when viewed on screen in an application like Preview or Adobe Acrobat, but print with a substitute default font on a PostScript printer; or the PDF may contain references to the font with the custom encoding but may appear on screen in a different font.

I ran into this problem while working nearly 72 straight hours on an annual report for one of my clients. I was receiving the financial documents from another designer in PDF format, and then splitting the financial documents apart into single pages for placement within the annual report. You would not believe how frustrating it was to try to diagnose why the resulting PDFs looked just fine but refused to print in the correct font!

Since the ability to read a PDF is built into OS X, I don't know if the problem is a bug within Preview itself or is actually a bug in the OS X Quartz PDF rendering engine.

@tacit: are you running 10.4.x, 10.5.x or 10.6.x?

If you have a lot of work like this, I would recommend Acrobat. You can find it for around $150 or even less. It can handle PDF in any way you want.
http://www.evaluesoftware.com/index.php?...CFQtfagodsHQMlw

10.5.8. I haven't upgraded to 10.6 yet.