In previous versions of Acrobat Reader (up to 2023), it was possible to open each PDF file in a new window. There was an option “Open Documents As New Tabs In The Same Window” which you can disable to achieve this. Such a separate view of files makes it much easier to work with multiple files as you can have the documents next to each other.
In a newer version (2023) Acrobat introduces a new user interface where PDF files are combined into a single window. The new user interface looks much cleaner, but the option to disable the tab bar navigation is no longer available. So when you oben a new PDF, it is always opened in the same window. You can manually move each tab into a new window, but this totally breaks your work flow and requires additional clicks.
There are various discussions on the missing option “[ ] Open Documents As New Tabs In The Same Window”. But none of them found a working solution yet – at least not for the new UI.
(Re-)Enabling the Option
The only solution to disable the single window behavior is to “Disable New Acrobat Reader”. This will (re-)enable the option in settings and give you control over the tab bar behavior. You will miss the new user interface, but you can (re-)optimize your work flow.
To do this…
- open the menu from the hamburger navigation
- select “Disable New Acrobat Reader”
In Preferences window, select “General” and now you can use the option “Open documents as new tabs in the same window”:
Hope this helps.
Feel free to give a comment if there is an update on Acrobat Reader that changes the current behavior.
Photo by Sunny Hassan on Unsplash
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