Adobe Acrobat 6.0.2 updater: Talk about confusing

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
June 9th, 2004 • 11:44 pm

Yesterday, I read about the release of an updater for Adobe’s Acrobat product, which I have and use occasionally. So I went to the Adobe web site to download the updater.

Never mind the fact that, even though Adobe changed the name of “Acrobat Reader” to “Adobe Reader” in version 6, everybody still calls it “Acrobat” and is not aware that “Acrobat” is a different product. You’d think Adobe themselves would be less confused about the names of their own products. Think again.

So apparently, if you go a visit the Adobe web site, you’ll find two updaters: one for Adobe Acrobat 6 Professional and Standard (the PDF authoring package), and one for Adobe Reader 6 (the PDF viewer).

But if you look at the file name listed in the left margin on both pages above the “download” button, you’ll see that… it’s the same on both page. And it’s called… “Acro-Reader_6.0.2_Upd_Pkg.dmg“. Ahem.

So, which is it? An updater for Acrobat 6 or an updater for Reader 6? It gets worse…

So I downloaded the file (from either page: it’s the same). And I launched it. After the customary password thing, it opened a dialog box asking me to “Select the Adobe Acrobat-Reader 6.0.1 application to update.” I kid you not: the “Adobe Acrobat-Reader 6.0.1 application”. Now what kind of monster is that? A Reader/Acrobat hybrid?

As a matter of fact, it looks like that’s exactly what it is: a hybrid updater that can be used to update both Acrobat (Profession or Standard) and Reader. I only have Reader 6.0 installed on my machine, not Reader 6.0.1 (I use Mac OS X’s Preview for most of my PDF viewing), so I was unable to verify that the updater does indeed update Reader 6.0.1 to Reader 6.0.2. But I was able to verify that it does update Acrobat 6.0.1 to Acrobat 6.0.2.

Which is good to know.

Because the least you can say is that Adobe’s own instructions are not exactly clear on the subject! Geez…


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