Publishing Adobe Acrobat 8 Pro & LiveCycle Designer

When publishing Adobe Acrobat 8 Pro or Adobe LiveCycle Designer 8 using Citrix Presentation Server 4.5 the application does not display. The session is established and then it ends. The Adobe application is never seen.

I have worked around this issue with this dirty hack. Create Run-Acrobat.cmd in the “%programfiles%\Adobe\Acrobat 8.0” folder:

pushd %~dp0

start “” “.\Acrobat\%1”
PING 1.1.1.1 -n 1 -w 5 >NUL

popd

And publish Acrobat Pro using this command line:
ctxhide “C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 8.0\Run-Acrobat.cmd” Acrobat.exe
And Distiller using this command line:
ctxhide “C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 8.0\Run-Acrobat.cmd” Acrodist.exe

It seems that if another process is running (in this case cmd.exe) when Acrobat or Distiller is launched, the application will start correctly. So all the script does is wait for 5 seconds while Acrobat is started.

With LiveCycle the same problem occurs plus an additional problem if you use appdata redirection. When LiveCycle starts it attemps to copy data into the users %appdata%\Adobe\Designer folder, but when using appdata redirection this copy fails. So, here goes another dirty hack…… Run LiveCycle as a user that does not have the appdata folder redirected, copy the %appdata%\Adobe\Designer\8.0\EN folder to either a share or onto the Presentation Server. The script prepopulates the users appdata folder this copy – you will need to tweak this script for your environment. Save this as Run-Designer.cmd:

pushd %~dp0

:: LiveCycle Designer fails to copy all required data to the users appdata
:: folder when the appdata folder is redirected. The next lines copies the
:: required data.
md “%appdata%\Adobe\Designer\8.0\EN”
xcopy /e /c /i /q /h /r /y “.\EN” “%appdata%\Adobe\Designer\8.0\EN”

:: Run LiveCycle Designer
start “” “..\Designer 8.0\FormDesigner.exe”
sleep 5

popd

An example published command line for LiveCycle is:
ctxhide “C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 8.0\_custom\Run-Designer.cmd”