Locale issues

If you are using RedHat 9 or Fedora, AcrobatReader will probably crash at launch due to a problem with character sets:

Warning: charset "UTF-8" not supported, using "ISO8859-1".
aborting

This problem occurs if your locale is set to one that uses UTF-8, which many distributions are now defaulting to. On other distributions (such as Debian and Slackware), AcrobatReader prints out the warning but doesn't abort. The locale(1) command will tell you what your locate is set to.

The workaround is to edit $PREFIX/Acrobat5/bin/acroread and add the following lines near the top

LANG=C
export LANG

See the UnicodeNotes page if you have no idea what "UTF-8" or "ISO-8859-1" means. :-)

Speeding up load times

Adobe AcrobatReader (Adobe Reader 6.0 on MicrosoftWindows) launches slowly because it loads a lot of usually superfluous plugins.

Remove all files except for EWH32.api, printme.api, and search.api from the C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 6.0\Reader\plug_ins directory (change this depending on where Reader is installed) and it will launch much faster.

Similar speedups can be achieved with older versions.

In Linux, you can do the same, the directory is $PREFIX/Acrobat5/Reader/intellinux/plug_ins/ then.