Geek Life - WinEdt 5.5, Adobe Acrobat 10 Fix

I recently got a new desktop computer at work which is, in my humble opinion, totally badass.  It's running Windows 7 64-bit on an Intel Core i7, the CPU runs at 3.4GHz and it has 8 GB of RAM. Yeah, it's screaming fast.

However, since I have the 64-bit version of Windows 7, some of the features (ones I use naturally) in Adobe Acrobat 7 didn't work. So, I upgraded Acrobat to version 10. While that fixed the previous problems, it caused new ones! Figures.  Nothing can ever be easy.

Upgrading to Acrobat 10 caused this warning to appear when converting a dvi to pdf in WinEdt 5.5:

"Cannot open DDE link to:
"C:\....\Acrobat\Acrobat.exe"
Service: acroview
Topic: control
DDEOpen('%$("AcroRead")'," acroview","control",0);

To me, this made NO sense at all because the pdf file would appear as normal. I would then have to OK the warning. Grrrr. And if that wasn't enough, the file Acrobat_OpenDoc.edt would open up in a new WinEdt tab highlighting the line of code causing the warning. This meant that EVERY TIME I converted a dvi to a pdf, a warning would appear that I needed to click on to get rid of and this file would open up and I would have to close it.

Have I mentioned that I convert dvi files to pdf files probably 100+ times a day? Say it takes 10 seconds to get rid of the warning and close the file.  That means I'd spend 16+ minutes clicking on warnings and closing useless files every day. Not only is that unbelievably annoying, I have much better ways to spend that 16 minutes, right? I could be writing new blog posts with that time!

The fix? Change one line of the Acrobat_OpenDoc.edt file from this:

DDEOpen('%$("AcroRead")'," acroview","control",0);

to this

DDEOpen('%$("AcroRead")'," acroviewA10","control",0);

A similar warning would appear if I tried to convert a dvi to a pdf while the previous pdf file was open from the previous conversion. The solution is to fix the same line of code in Acrobat_CloseDoc.edt.