The Believers: The hidden story behind the code that runs our lives

Deep learning is dominating the news these days, but it's quite possible the field could have died if not for a mysterious call that Geoff Hinton, now at Google, got one night in the 1980s: "You don't know me, but I know you," the mystery man said. "I work for the System Development Corporation. We want to fund long-range speculative research. We're particularly interested in research that either won't work or, if it does work, won't work for a long time. And I've been reading some of your papers." The Chronicle of Higher Ed has a readable profile of the minds behind neural nets, from Rosenblatt to Hassabis, told primarily through Hinton's career.

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Missing "Convert to Adobe PDF" context menu?

Missing "Convert to Adobe PDF" context menu?

Many Acrobat users love the context menus added to Windows Explorer that allow them to right-click a file (of any supported type) and convert it into a PDF file, or right-click a selection of multiple files and either convert them all, or combine them into a single PDF file or PDF Portfolio:

On rare occasions though, this context menu goes astray during updates. If that happens to you, there's a way to bring it back without having to reinstall anything.

These are the instructions for Windows 7 64-bit and Acrobat X:

• From your Windows Start Menu, open the All Programs / Accessories folder
• Right-click "Command Prompt" and choose "Run as Administrator"
• In the UAC dialog that pops up (if UAC is enabled), click Yes.
• The black command prompt window will open. Type the following single line into the box, including the quotes, and press Enter:

regsvr32 "C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Acrobat 10.0\Acrobat Elements\ContextMenu64.dll"

• You'll get a dialog box saying the command has successed (hopefully!) If not, check your spelling.
• Close the command prompt window, and your context menus will be back!

If you want to copy and paste from this blog, you can, but pasting into a command prompt is a bit different - don't press ctrl-V, instead copy the line above and right-click somewhere on the command prompt window, choosing "Paste" from the little menu box.


With Windows 7 32-bit and Acrobat 9, the line you enter changes to:

regsvr32 "C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 9.0\Acrobat Elements\ContextMenu.dll"

Other combinations should make sense - "(x86)" and "64.dll" if you're on a 64-bit machine, and the version of Acrobat in the middle. Note that even if you're updated to Acrobat 9.4, the folder is still called "Acrobat 9.0".

On Windows XP, the instructions are the same but there's no "Run as Administrator" option as there's no user Account Control. You should instead be logged in as an administrator.

It doesn't do any harm to run the command twice, even if the context menus are already working - so it's possible to deploy it across an enterprise where only some machines need fixing.

This article was copied from a removed blog - The Acrobat Ninja -  http://acrobatninja.blogspot.com/2011/03/missing-convert-to-adobe-pdf-context.html