Posted on by Ram

Adobe Reader Hide or Remove Tool Pane

Adobe Reader is used everywhere these days, many browsers supported built-in PDF viewer. Since Adobe Acrobat Reader came out, many features are added for the paid version, but if you are using just free Reader, this Tool pane is just annoying. Every time you open the PDF document in Adobe Acrobat Reader. You have three options To hide Tools Pane or To Remove Tools Pane or Other options. If you are not using any paid version of Adobe application removing is best option by editing Adobe Acrobat installation file. This option will Remove Tools pane, will not be able to open, which is best if you are not using any paid version cloud-based application.

To hide the Tool Pane:

Open Adobe Acrobat Reader or any PDF document Document

Click on the Arrows to hide the Tool Pane

Or you can click on View>Show/Hide>Tools Pane

or use keyboard and press Shift+F4

Once you have hiden the Tools Panes, then Go to Edit>Preferences
Select Documents under Categories, then on right side select checkbox “Remember the current state of Tools Pane“

Open a any PDF document and the Tools Pane should be hidden, and can be shown with the Shift+F4 key as before.

Remove Tools pane

To remove it, you will need to open installation of your Adobe Acrobat Reader and edit Viewer.aapp file by right click on the file and open in notepad or any text editor, my file location is: C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Acrobat Reader DC\Reader\AcroApp\ENU\Viewer.aapp

Then comment out or delete this code from the file

<Layout name="Default">
    <RHP>
        <Component name="AppShortcutListView" type="Custom"/>
    </RHP>
</Layout>

So it should be something like this:

<Application xmlns="http://ns.adobe.com/acrobat/app/2014" title="Viewer" id="Viewer" majorVersion="1" requiresDoc="true" minorVersion="0">

</Application>

Open any PDF document and the Tools Pane should be removed if you need to put it back in future you will need edit this file or re-install Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Other options:

This option is for advance users and requires you to make changes to registry key, which can cause issue, if not done correctly. For Acrobat DC your registry path might be slightly different, please look for the similar or same name. Make sure to close Acrobat Reader if it is opened

Open Registry by : typing in command: regedit

For Adobe Acrobat Reader or Adobe DC:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Acrobat.Document.DC\shell\Open\command

String to be modified original:
“C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Acrobat DC\Acrobat\Acrobat.exe” “%1”

Change it to:
“C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Acrobat DC\Acrobat\Acrobat.exe” /A “navpanes=0” “%1”

You may have:
“C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Acrobat Reader DC\Reader\AcroRd32.exe” / u “%1”

For Acrobat Reader XI of version location might be:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\AcroExch.Document.11\shell\Read\command

This is the original:
“C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Reader 11.0\Reader\AcroRd32.exe” “%1”

Change it to:
“C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Reader 11.0\Reader\AcroRd32.exe” /A “navpanes=0” “%1”

That’s it, you might need to restart the computer.


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