An Acrobat touchup

A pushpin

I noticed that when you are printing with Adobe Acrobat on Windows, there has been a minor UI error for a long time. It’s been there since at least Acrobat Reader X in 2011. Now it’s fixed in recent versions such as 2023.008.20421 or later.

When you print a document, you can select a subset of the document’s pages. (For example “5-10”) Once one makes the selection, Acrobat updates a slider below the preview to only show the selected pages. Simultaneously, it replaces the text beneath the slider to show the new range of pages available.

Earlier versions would overprint the descriptive text until the preview changed.

The steps to reproduce the error:

  • Open a multipage document and start the print dialog.
  • Select the Pages radio button option in the “pages to print” area.
  • Type a subset of the document’s pages in the edit area.
  • Press tab

Formerly, one might get this overtype (For example, from a 2015 version of Acrobat):

A clip from a dialog with illegible text

(Once the user moved the slider, the text would be corrected.)

Now you get the information cleanly right away:

A clip from a dialog with the text 'Page 1 of 6 (5)

The longevity of this tiny bug is a testament to the advantage of getting software right in the beginning. Something subtle might not be noticed for a long time. It takes more verbiage to describe an error while finding it in early testing could prevent it from getting old.