Adobe's PDF-generation (and customer service-) FAIL

Posted on Dec 8, 2009 in Design, IT | 9 comments

Recently I worked on a problem at my job whose solution involved the use of PDF files (and PHP and other cool stuff that I’ll post about soon). Unfortunately, this process exposed me to some poor software design and horrible customer-service issues from a company I usually like and whose products I respect.

A bad software feature…

Admittedly, Adobe’s software software has some problems, but I’ve personally not run into them until now. The “merge to PDF” function provided by Acrobat Professional 9 (for Windows; I’ve not tried this on a Mac) for use in Word’s mail-merge feature has a glaring oversight: it doesn’t provide a way to name the sequencing of the resulting files. An example: say you are mail-merging 50 letters to PDF. You enter “DeansLetter” as the base name for the PDFs but end up with a folder full of PDFs that are named “DeansLetter01001,” “DeansLetter01002,” “DeansLetter01003,” etc.

What’s the big deal, you ask? Though it’s annoying you can’t specify the sequence’s starting number or the number of digits, the huge problem lies in creating a large number of PDFs. Strangely, Acrobat uses some seemingly arbitrary group number, followed by a three-digit sequence. When generating over a thousand letters, as we did, that group number and sequence varied so that sorting the files by name resulted in a list that was out-of-order relative to the data file used in the merge. Put simply: a very large data set in alphabetical order by recipient last name generates a list of mail-merged files that, when sorted sequentially, aren’t in alphabetical order.

This of course, is awful. And so easily avoided! Adobe could have simply appended a number beginning at 1 increasing from there. That way, at least, a natural sort algorithm could keep them in order. Or smarter yet: identify the number of items in the data set and append the proper number of leading zeros. So a set of 50 items would begin at 01; 125 items would begin at 001; 13,000 would start at 00001, etc. Easy. But it’s as though Adobe’s engineers tested this function with a handful of records. “It works,” I hear them say “merge-to-PDF function: check.” Sure, technically it works… but it’s inelegant and doesn’t work with a lot records, which surely is a common use case for this function. Where is the user testing that a great software company like Adobe should routinely employ? It’s hard to imagine a real user not mentioning something like this.

Even Adobe’s own online help is barely coherent about this function’s use:

To name the PDF that will be created, type in the Specify PDF File Name box.

Note: The PDF will be named using this text plus a series of numbers. For example, if you type JulyLetter in the Specify PDF File Name box, the mail-merged PDFs might appear as JulyLetter_0000123, JulyLetter_0000124, July Letter_0000125, and so forth.

“…a series of numbers…”? “PDFs might appear”? Technical documentation should never include “might” when describing a result of a software operation. And I can assure you that the numbering sequence we received didn’t match the help file’s description. Terrible.

…led to an even worse customer-service experience

Trying to be a good citizen, I left a very complete (and polite!) explanation of the issue (including a detailed example) we experienced on Adobe’s community help forum. A day later I received a message from Adobe’s forum moderator telling me my post was a feature request, not a comment, and therefore had been removed. They unhelpfully suggested I re-post it on one of their feature request forums instead. Amazingly, they did not include my post in the e-mail message, and of course was never posted to the page; it was gone. I’d spent over 10 minutes writing a helpful post that they essentially deleted, yet they expected me to re-type it somewhere else? So I responded—again politely—asking for a copy of my post and explaining why I wanted it, but I never heard back. That’s horrible. This “service” cost them a lot of brand loyalty from me and earned this negative press.

So what is the purpose of this post? Not just to complain because that never solves anything. Instead, I hope that it inspires software developers to test their features with “edge cases,” (like very big or very tiny data sets), not just the typical cases. Anyone moderating a forum should also take note to include a customer’s initial submission in their response (though I know most already do, which is why Adobe’s failure to do so is so frustrating). And, finally, if someone at Adobe happens upon this post, maybe they’ll do something about to fix that merge-to-PDF numbering feature. One can always hope, right?

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