Now, your PDFs will look the way you want them to when you open them, and you can always manually change the view on the rare occasion that the document you’re viewing requires it. In the Get Info menu, select Adobe Reader or Acrobat under the Open With section. If you have already installed Adobe and are still unable to set Adobe Reader or Acrobat as your default viewer, you can do so by right-clicking on the PDF and then select Get Info. Once you’ve set your default view, click OK to save your changes and close the Preferences window. When prompted, select Adobe Reader as your default PDF viewer. For my personal example, I’ll set Page Layout to “Two-Up” and Zoom to “Automatic.” This will give me the view type I prefer (two pages side-by-side fit to the size of the window) every time I open a new PDF in Acrobat. Here you can change the default view type from the Page Layout and Zoom drop-down menus. Next, on the right side of the window, find the section at the top labeled Default Layout and Zoom.

From the Preferences window, select Page Display from the list of categories on the left side. In both Windows and macOS, launch Acrobat and head to Edit > Preferences in the app’s toolbar (Windows) or menu bar (Mac). Thankfully, there’s an easy way to fix this frustration: you can change your default view in Acrobat’s settings. No matter how many times I change my view to the “two page” mode, Acrobat always reverts back to its default “single page view” the next time I launch the app or open a new PDF. But what’s frustrating is that Acrobat’s default view type is a single scrolling page. I read a lot of PDFs in Adobe Acrobat, and my preferred reading view is the “two page view,” with two pages side-by-side.

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