Customizing Adobe Acrobat Reader DC (Free) Tool sidebar

Is it possible to customizing the side bar on the right Adobe Acrobat Reader DC (Free)? If so, how?

The available documentation here shows options that don't appear when I try to duplicate them (e.g. under Add or remove shortcuts of tools in the right pane, "Remove Shortcut" is not displayed when I right click).

I specifically want to add Certificate to the tool bar so its always visible I would, if possible, also like to remove the other unused / unusable tools.

Thanks Ed

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1 Answer

I want to do the same: Add the Certificate tool to the right hand Tools section. The only info I have found about customizing the Tools section, is about Adobe Acrobat (Paid version). I haven't found a way of doing that in Reader (Free version), but I did find a way to hide the unusable tools like Export PDF, Edit PDF, etc.

Registry info for every tool

In the following registry key, there are sub-keys (like c0, c1, and so on) containing the descriptions of every Tool.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Adobe\Acrobat Reader\DC\AcroApp\cRegistered

The string value in tTitle contains the title of the Tool as it appears on the right hand side.

The string value in tPath contains the corresponding .aapp file that can be found inside C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Acrobat Reader DC\Reader\AcroApp\ENU

How to hide Tools

To hide the tools I didn't need, I used the above registry info to find the file names of the .aapp files corresponding to the Tools I didn't need (for example, the file name of the Export PDF Tool is EPDF_Full.aapp). Then I renamed each .aapp file I didn't need to .aapp.bak in folder C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Acrobat Reader DC\Reader\AcroApp\ENU

The next time I opened Reader again, the tools I had renamed disappeared after a short while :)