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Acrobat for Windows and Mac: User Interface

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Reopen PDFs Launched in previous sessions on Opening Acrobat/Reader

A Prereference in Acrobat should be there which loads the last session of opened tabs/pdfs on relaunching. Also could provide options to save/load previous sessions.
This may be Important to the users who work on several pdfs at a time but wish to retain the opened docs in the next Acrobat session.
Also Session could be managed to retain even after machine restart and then launching acrobat.

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AdminAyush Jain (Lead Software Engineer, Adobe) shared this idea  ·   ·  Report…  ·  Admin →
Implemented  ·  AdminAyush Jain (Lead Software Engineer, Adobe) responded  · 

Hi,

We are delighted to share with you that Acrobat and Reader Desktop release for DC Continuous (2019.012.20036) is Live now and this Takes care of the Feature Request to Restore Previous Session by Default on Next Acrobat/Reader Launch.

More Info Here : https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/whats-new.html#PreferencetoreopenPDFsfromthelastAcrobatsession

Please update your Acrobat (It should Auto update or you should do Help → Check for updates) and let us know your Feedback.

Thanks
Ayush Jain

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  • abambo commented  ·   ·  Report

    I prefer deciding myself to open them from the recent files folder.

  • Anonymous commented  ·   ·  Report

    Another macOS reader is Skim. This does remember sessions and reloads the files.

  • Anonymous commented  ·   ·  Report

    It's been over a year since this problem was first posted and nobody from Adobe seems to give a **** to even say they are looking into this basic feature which should be standard. Very poor customer service!

  • Anonymous commented  ·   ·  Report

    This is a standard feature in most other tools and like several people below have said, you have to reboot your computer and losing the PDFs is a major pain. I did find a website which offered some javascript to do this and it worked, but I would much prefer if it was a built-in feature.

  • Chojrak commented  ·   ·  Report

    > So is anyone from Adobe even looking into this problem??????

    No, it's beyond their capabilities. More and more basic apps can do that, but not Acrobat nor Acrobat Reader.

  • Another Acrobat User commented  ·   ·  Report

    +1 for this please.
    I maintain systems for users at work who have to have dozens of documents open simultaneously for concurrent projects, and restarting their machines (for periodic maintenance reasons) is a source of pain.

  • Anonymous commented  ·   ·  Report

    Ayush, what is the status on this feature? It's clear that many people want it included but there has been no response from you or anyone at Adobe in a YEAR!

  • Anonymous commented  ·   ·  Report

    So is anyone from Adobe even looking into this problem??????

  • Nestor Albuquerque commented  ·   ·  Report

    This is one of the many occurrences of the same question (that I also need answred).
    And it seems the Admin that posted the tip didn't realize that Shift-Control-T opens the "Insert page" dialog.

  • Michael P. commented  ·   ·  Report

    Operating systems must be rebooted with relative frequency. In the process, when Acrobat is restarted the set of open documents is lost.

    The simplest solution is for Acrobat to:
    (1) Offer a setting (for example, like Chrome) whether documents are reloaded on restart of Acrobat.
    (2) On restart of Acrobat, prompt the user to reopen documents from the previous session.
    (3) Securely maintain a persistent list of opened documents, for use only by the restart feature.
    (4) Reopen documents in the same sequence as at last shutdown of Acrobat.
    (5) Display an error message for each document that cannot be reopened (file no longer accessible after restart).

  • J commented  ·   ·  Report

    I completely agree with this suggestion! I do legal work and sometimes have two dozen or so documents open at a time. If Windows updates, then I must figure out which documents were open and then open them again. I would really like a "restore previous session" option in Acrobat!

  • etsuko commented  ·   ·  Report

    Having this as a feature in Acrobat will make my life a bit easier. Please add it asap!

  • Anonymous commented  ·   ·  Report

    As much as I appreciate Acrobat Pro, it is astonishing that this feature is not included. Nitro doesn't work with Macs unfortunately but if they do, then I will have to switch. It is a game changing feature as I have also lost too much work because the app or computer crashed. The open recent files option is not very useful if you opened a file weeks ago. Help!

  • unhappy commented  ·   ·  Report

    Nitro reader does this and a lot more. Just tried Acrobat Reader DC after switching to NITRO years ago. It never occurred to me that my open documents would not be reloaded because they always are in Nitro. I was working on several related things and going back and forth in the documents. Not sure what I saved. Had to restart computer, When I opened Acrobat, no documents reloaded. This is such an important and basic thing. Because it is not in Acrobat, I have potentially lost hours of work. I'm going back to NITRO.

  • Alex commented  ·   ·  Report

    It would be useful to be able to save a work-session or work-space and open it again in the future, including but not limited to currently open documents and the order their tabs are in.

    Selecting several PDF documents in Windows Explorer and opening all at once doesn't guarantee the order of the tabs.

  • Anonymous commented  ·   ·  Report

    How do you open the PDF in Firefox?

  • Anonymous commented  ·   ·  Report

    This is a much needed feature.
    My solution to this problem is reading my pdfs in Firefox, which has the ability to restore the last session when reopening.

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