Installing Adobe Acrobat Pro On Terminal Server

When you view PDF files in Adobe Acrobat or Adobe Reader in a Terminal Server/Citrix environment, the display is slow to update over an RDP connection. This issue is particularly noticeable when scrolling through PDF documents that contain high-resolution images.

Solution 1: Update the Page Display preferences in Acrobat or Reader.

Terminal Server deployment¶ You must install applications by using Add or Remove Programs on the RDS server. To install Acrobat products: Choose Start Settings Control Panel Add or Remove Programs. Choose Next Browse to locate the installer. Hi all, question in regards to Acrobat Pro licensing on a terminal server. We currently have 140 staff, and approx 70 users that log onto a RDP server when working from home. We have Perpetual licensing that covers all 140 of our staff.

Change the following settings in Acrobat or Reader. You can either disable these options directly in Reader/Acrobat under 'Edit > Preferences > Page Display > Rendering', or using the registry keys for system administrators:

deactivate '2D Graphic acceleration' HKCUSoftwareAdobeAcrobat Reader9.0AVDisplay - bUse2DGPUf=dword:0
deactivate “Smooth images' HKCUSoftwareAdobeAcrobat Reader9.0Originals - bAntialiasImages=dword:0
deactivate “Smooth line art' HKCUSoftwareAdobeAcrobat Reader9.0Originals - bAntialiasGraphics=dword:0
set 'Smooth Text' to None (optional: some customers have reported acceptable performance without setting Smooth Text to None)
- HKCUSoftwareAdobeAcrobat Reader9.0Originals - bAntialiasText=dword:0
- HKCUSoftwareAdobeAcrobat Reader9.0Originals - iAntialiasThreshold=dword:0
- HKCUSoftwareAdobeAcrobat Reader9.0Originals - benableDDR=dword:0

Changing registry values is not officially supported by Adobe and you do so at your own risk. You should only be changing the registry settings if you have the correct privileges and experience in this area.

System Administrators should change these settings first using the Preferences dialog in Adobe Reader (not using the registry) and re-test the performance through Citrix. Once you have the right combination of settings that work, then you should record the values of these registry keys to use for your other Reader installations. This is important as the value of the iAntialiasThreshold key can differ (0, 1, or 12) depending on which of the other options are deactiviated.

Note: These settings will improve the display performance on low-bandwidth connections, however, they can adversely affect the display performance on LAN connections. You will need to test these thoroughly.

Solution 2: Use an RDP compression tool to compress the data being sent 'over-the-wire.'

RDP sends the entire set of image data each time the image is scrolled on the page. Sending all the data at once can cause congestion on the network connection, especially with limited bandwidth. Some customers have had success using the following tool to improve the display performance on Terminal Server for low-bandwidth connections: http://www.ericom.com/ericom_blaze.asp

There are no general solutions in Acrobat or Reader to improve performance problems in Terminal Server. Performance issues are often based on the bandwidth limitations of the network connection, or the RDP protocol itself.

The RDP protocol does not always handle image data well. A terminal server on Windows 2003 Server uses RDP version 5.2. A terminal server on Windows 2008 Server uses RDP version 7.0, which does improve display performance for images. Therefore, an upgrade to a later operating system can also improve the performance if it uses a more recent RDP version like 7.0.

The environment I currently work in needed to make Adobe Acrobat Pro available to users in our Citrix XenApp environment due to the big push we have for telework. Here are steps that can be taken to make this happen so that users who are not licensed for Adobe Acrobat Pro are not able to use it and that Adobe Reader remains the default pdf reader on the server.
Notes:Installed on a Windows 2008 x64 server running Citrix XenApp 5
Transforms file was created using Adobe Customization Wizard

-Install Adobe Reader X Pro (in install mode, of course) using a manual or automated method and using a transforms file as an argument.For instance:

msiexec /qn /norestart /i 'd:installSOFTWAREAdobeAdobe Acrobat XAcroPro.msi' TRANSFORMS='d:installSOFTWAREAdobeAdobe Acrobat XAcrobatX10.mst'

-Create a security group that will contain the user accounts of people you want to provide Acrobat Pro access to.Set NTFS permissions on Acrobat.exe and Acrotray.exe so that it will not be executable except for this group.

-Publish it as an application to the group you created via CAMC in the step above.If you are publishing a desktop, add the icon for it via a script, group policy preferences or some desktop management software, assuming you have one (like triCerat Simplify, etc...).

-Set the registry for users who log on to have Adobe Reader as their default pdf reader.You can do this by importing a reg file via a script, group policy preferences or using profile management software.Here are the keys/values to set:

Installing Adobe Acrobat Pro On Terminal Server

[HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorerFileExts.pdfOpenWithList]

[HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorerFileExts.pdfUserChoice]

Installing Adobe Acrobat Pro

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In my case, I wrote a quick batch file that I use as a startup script in AD that installs the application using msiexec.exe and sets permissions using xcacls.vbs.I am using desktop management software to “publish” the icon to user desktops and set their default pdf reader.