Sunday, February 4, 2007

One Note 2007 / Adobe Reader 8 Bug

So, I recently finished installing Office 2007 Ultimate on my desktop and tablet. Very nice piece of software so far. I spent a few hours configuring One Note 2007. I use it for taking notes and scanning/organizing/searching technical articles, recipes, and projects from woodworking magazines. I should say that I use One Note 2007 for this. Prior to this version, it's capabilities were a lot more limited, and I was struggling with ScanSoft PaperPort 11 for my scanning/organizing needs. At any rate, I'm not writing this to give a review of Office. Instead, I would like to point out a bug that I found that may help others out there.

One Note 2007 has the ability to import various different types of documents. There are several ways, but I like to simply drag the document into a page in One Note and select the "Insert the file as printout so I can add notes to it" option. The result is that you get a "printed" copy of the document on the page in One Note. Then, you can scribble notes, full-text index it, etc. Behind the scenes, it appears that One Note actually launches the program it knows can read the file (e.g. Adobe Reader for PDFs) and then simply prints using a special driver that results in the file going into One Note. The bug I found was with Version 8 of Adobe Reader. I tried various things to get it to work. It seemed like it was printing, but the document never showed up in One Note. Then, I happened to go into my office and saw that there was a stack of paper in the printer outfeed, all copies of the same thing. Apparently, the PDF was going to the printer instead of One Note. I had an older version of Acrobat (6.0.1) on a different PC that was working just fine, so I ended up just uninstalling 8 and installing 6. Everything worked just fine after that. Other than simply reading PDF files, I don't use Adobe Reader for anything else. So, I wasn't deriving much benefit from 8 over 6 anyways. You can download older versions of Acrobat from Adobe's website.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Well said.