Only Mac users who have upgraded, or are thinking about upgrading to Lion, need to read this post.
I upgraded two Macs to the new Lion operating system, which has a new auto-save feature that saves files automatically from the moment you open a new file. It also saves the various states of the file as you work on, the idea being you can revert to an older state.
This seems to cause problems in a couple of programs, one of them being Acrobat. And this is consistently reproducible bug on my two Mac machines. Here is what I’ve noticed.
When I bookmark a large PDF and then attempt to use the “Split by bookmark” option it fails to split and says that one of the files is already in existence. The problem is so entrenched that I can no longer split files “by bookmark” using Acrobat, at least not if I used Acrobat to create the bookmarks.
I was able to use a third party program called PDF Pen Pro to create bookmarks and then when I opened the file in Acrobat I was able to split the file by bookmarks. I noticed a weird behavior with PDFPen that I’m not sure is supposed to happen: when I created the bookmark the page I was viewing would auto advance to the next page. Weird.
Makes me wonder if the Lion upgrade is creating havoc with some of the old programs that haven’t been upgraded to be compatible. I know Adobe and Apple have a strained relationship (mostly over Apple’s decision not to allow Flash on iPhones and iPads). But I hope that Adobe will work with Apple to quickly upgrade Acrobat to deal with this issue.
I’ve tested both Acrobat 9 and Acobat X and the problem is there in both versions. Again, I’ve only encountered the problem when splitting a PDF by bookmarks. That’s a niche thing, but important to folks who want to break up one PDF containing many ‘documents’ into PDFs that contain only one document.
