Disable Content Preparation Progress Dialog in Adobe Acrobat

Content Preparation Progress Dialog

If you have been annoyed by this following dialog when you open PDF files in Adobe Acrobat v8, here are the two different ways is the way you can disable it.

  • Rename the Accessibility.api and ReadOutLoud.api to Accessibility.old and ReadOutLoud.old (or you can move them to a different folder). These files are found in C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 8.0\Acrobat\plug_ins. This solution however, has the possibilty that a future upgrade of Acrobat would cause these plugins to renable.
  • Remove “Speech Recognition” from the Language Tool bar, settings, Installed Services. The other way to get this, if you don’t have the Language Toolbar visible, is via the Regional and Language Options Control Panel, under the Languages Tab, and click on the Details button and then you can remove any references to “Speech Recognition” that you find under the Installed Services.

Published by

Jeremy Snyder

TODO: add interesting Bio info here :-)

65 thoughts on “Disable Content Preparation Progress Dialog in Adobe Acrobat”

  1. Denny 12/30/2011- solved my problem in just a few minutes. Using Acrobat 9 (version 9.4.5) Pro. Thanks.

  2. Thanks for the direction. Was really starting to piss me off.

    Changed the security settings on the files to “DENY” for all listed users.
    System
    Administrators
    User.

    Hopefully this will prevent updats from deleting and updating or overwriting the files.

    This does stop acrobat from processing the files.
    Works even though I have domain adminstrator andlocal adminstrator rights to my workstation.

  3. Thanks for this. Acrobat 9.5 was crashing on a document compare. The compare would start and halfway through it would freeze up trying to do “content preparation” on one or the other of the files. A watchdog timer would go off and the application would be declared crashed. Making this change and acknowledging the lack of a screen reader on the next start made it all work. I mean, I just move my lips when I read, I don’t require content preparation.

  4. I think you can just go into Edit>Preferences>Reader and select “Only read the current visible pages” under the Screen Reader Options. Easy!

  5. smartuser, i tried your solution (as well as a couple of others) but they did was crash the program 80% of the time i opened a .pdf
    changing the file names as mentioned above works!

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