Edit toolbars in Acrobat Pro XI

Can I get rid of "Create" and "Customize" on the toolbar? I don't create, sign, print or email PDFs. I proofread and mark up files. I need two windows open at once, but the icons I need for markup get cropped off on the right side of the top toolbar if I have two PDFs open side by side. I skipped Pro X, and the toolbars in Pro XI are much less useful than the ones in Pro 9.
Is it possible to get smaller icons? Icons I'll never use are huge. Can I resize the vertical Comments panel on the right side of the screen? It's much wider than it needs to be. (Half an inch--wide enough to show an icon--would be plenty. 2.25 inches is huge and nearly half the width of my PDFs at 100%.) Acrobat is taking all my screen real estate for icons and toolbars and leaving little room for the actual PDFs.
Also--no "first page / last page" icons? I used those constantly in huge files. I've upgraded my Acrobat Pro and acquired a raft of features I'll never use while losing half the functions I relied on.


Kathy Fowler


3 Answers

Voted Best Answer

To show the navigation buttons you need, go to menu View -> Show/Hide -> Toolbar Items -> Page Navigation (or right click on an empty place on the horizontal toolbar). I always show all page navigation tools, for example.

enter image description here

To add a tool to the horizontal toolbar and/or change its position, go to menu View -> Show/Hide -> Toolbar Items -> Edit Current Tool Set...

enter image description here

enter image description here

enter image description here

enter image description here


By Almir R V Santos   

Thanks for getting me my first page/last page icons. For the rest, I think I'm just screwed



This shows the tools I'll use--and all the ones I won't. Why do I have to lose toolbar real estate to the word "Customize"? I can right-click on the toolbar or use a drop-down menu to get the same thing. And "Create"? It's right under "File" on the top menu. I'll probably never use it in either location, but I surely don't need it glued onto my toolbar.



This is what it looks like when I'm trying to work. (File on the right is the one I'm proofreading; file on the left is the marked-up file I'm reading against.) As you can see, all those lovely, useful annotation tools I added to the toolbar are invisble thanks to the space occupied by "Customize" and "Create" and other icons I won't use. I'll have to use the down-arrow in the toolbar to get to the tools I need constantly. If they would at least allow you to turn off that left set of icons, or move other, user-chosen icons to the left so they'd be reachable...

I loved v.9, which let you customize the entire toolbar set and even turn toolbars into floating palettes. Now, Adobe has decided which useless-to-me tools I must see at all times, making extra work for me to get to the tools I actually need. Instead of letting me decide how I need to work, Adobe has decided for me--and gotten it very wrong. I realize Adobe couldn't predict how I would want to work--or how other users would work. But that's exactly why their current approach to toolbars is all wrong.

(I won't even discuss the fixed-width Tools/Sign/Comment panel on the right. Worse than useless for me.)


Kathy Fowler   

Unfortunately it won't be possible to customize the toolbar the way you need in Acrobat XI.
You can submit a feature request directly to Adobe at: https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=wishform


Almir R V Santos   


Please specify a reason: