How to Hide Paywalled Features in Adobe Reader

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Adobe Reader is a free PDF viewer, whose manufacturer tries to push their paid product, Adobe Acrobat, by displaying many buttons that invoke paid features. Those features include “Edit PDF”, “Combine Files”, “Organize Pages” and others. There is also a persistent message in the sidebar inviting the user to try the paid product. If you never intend to subscribe to Acrobat, you can hide these upsell links in Reader.

To hide all tools from the sidebar that require payment, set the following registry key:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Adobe\Adobe Acrobat\DC\FeatureLockDown]
"bAcroSuppressUpsell"=dword:00000001

That will leave you with just one promotional button at the bottom of the sidebar, which encourages the user to start the Adobe Acrobat trial. To remove that message, set the following two registry keys:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Adobe\Adobe Acrobat\DC\FeatureLockDown\cIPM]
"bShowMsgAtLaunch"=dword:00000000
"bDontShowMsgWhenViewingDoc"=dword:00000000

Now the sidebar should be almost empty – no buttons trying to sell you a subscription.

Bonus Tip

In business-like environments, you might want to prevent users from signing in to their personal Adobe accounts in Reader. To remove the “Sign In” link from the top toolbar, you can set the following registry key (the name is really b­Updater, even though it controls the sign in link):

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Adobe\Adobe Acrobat\DC\FeatureLockDown\cServices]
"bUpdater"=dword:00000000

You can find even more configurable settings in the Acrobat Enterprise Toolkit documentation.