I've read a number of posts on here going back at least 3 years about how difficult it is to deal with Acrobat and Open Dental, and various tricks to attempt to make it work smoothly and/or not crash Open Dental. Like the thread named "Acrobat hell". Tried them all, on multiple PC's, and across multiple versions of OD. No Joy.
This got worse in my environment in the past few months and almost every PC has this issue; not sure if it occurred around the last few updates on 19.x or when I upgrade to 20.1.x. Perhaps the issue is Adobe or Microsoft, but we're only experiencing problems when in OD.
Basically, if we try to use Acrobat DC (as recommended by Open Dental Support), half the PC's crash when trying to preview or view a PDF document in the images folder. This is with and without protected mode etc etc.... the other half don't crash but the PDF doesn't open. Usually you have to exit OD and log in again to resolve.
When you install the latest Acrobat DC directly from the Adobe site, it immediately requires an update. However, it doesn't ask for one. You have to prompt it. Testing this situation with the pre-update or post-update version result in the same problem for most workstations.
To prevent crashes, we uninstalled Acrobat from the PC's, leaving Windows default PDF viewer. This means when we click on a PDF in OD Images, it pops up an OPEN/SAVE box instead of previewing it. Even worse, if you import a PDF, it instantly pops up with this open/save dialog since it is trying to show the preview. This is a pain.
This is such a pain, staff are saving scanned documents as jpgs to get around this problem. While this is not terrible, it is not ideal. I want PDF's of documents, not photographs of documents. Strange things sometime happen when you try to print.
Here's what it looks like when you click on an OD image file that is a PDF:
That message "Navigation to the webpage was canceled" looks suspiciously like Internet Explorer. Please tell me OD isn't using any code or libraries related to that ancient and decrepit IE browser? Because nothing modern, good or wholesome uses that browser or code for anything...
So has anyone found a solution, free or paid? I don't mind paying for 3rd party PDF licenses (well, not the $179.88/yr professional level app, just a decent reader)?
Thanks!