TexnicCenter and Adobe Reader 8.0

(For my Dutch speaking readers: this post containing work related stuff on a technical software communication problem is meant to help out people over the globe and therefore written in English.)

Those of you who make use of the mathematical typesetting tool MikTeX (or a similar version) combined with the use of some version of the editor TexnicCenter will have noticed that troubles occur when viewing your pdf document in the new Adobe Reader 8.0. Nothing goes wrong when opening and viewing your document, but the minute you want to close the Adobe Reader or recompile your document in the TexnicCenter editor, an “Unknown Software Exception (0xc000000d) at location 0×7813892c” is thrown. The error itself is not much to worry about, but in my case it messed up my Firefox PDF plugin. The error is due to the fact that in your TexnicCenter output profiles the DDE commands you pass through to Adobe Reader 8.0 aren’t correct. These need therefore to be altered and this can be done as follows.

Go to Build -> Define Output Profiles in the menu bar of TexnicCenter or press Alt-F7. For the profiles that build a pdf file (most likely the profiles “LaTeX => PDF” and “LaTeX => PS => PDF”) go to the viewer tab. Here you have to alter three fields:

1. In the field View project’s output enable the option DDE command, delete whatever command there is in the next line and write there: [DocOpen("%bm.pdf")][DocOpen("%bm.pdf")]
2. In the field Forward Search enable the option DDE command, delete whatever command there is in the next line and write there:
   [DocOpen("%bm.pdf")][DocOpen("%bm.pdf")]
3. In the field Close document before running (La)TeX enable the option DDE command, delete whatever command there is in the next line and write there:
   [DocOpen("%bm.pdf")][DocOpen("%bm.pdf")][DocClose("%bm.pdf")]

That should solve your problems.

Update: If the problem isn’t solved, check the quotation marks. They probably weren’t copied correctly. If that doesn’t work, you could try the following lines: [DocOpen("%bm.pdf")][FileOpen("%bm.pdf")] for point 1 and 2; [DocClose("%bm.pdf")] for point 3. That’s what my newest TexnicCenter filled in automatically for me and it works with Reader 8.1.2. If you still have problems check underneath each DDE command the “Server” and the “Topic”. In those boxes “acroview” and “control” should be filled out respectively (thx Maarten for pointing that out in the commets).