For years (years!), I have been annoyed by a behavior of Adobe Reader and Acrobat. When you open up a PDF, the viewer will scale the PDF to fit your resolution. On my monitor with 1680×1050 resolution, PDFs would start off zoomed to 174%. On my other monitor with 1920×1200 resolution, documents would start zoomed in to 232%. Every time after opening the PDF, I will click the zoom out button until it gets to 100%.
To me, that makes no sense! Just because I have more screen real estate, I probably don’t want to see the same thing but larger. I want to be able to fit more on the screen. Fortunately, there is an easy setting to change this behavior in version 10 and 11 of Reader and Acrobat. I just never bothered to look before.
To adjust the behavior, go to the Edit menu, and select Preferences…
A new window will pop up and under the Page Display category, there is a ‘Default Layout and Zoom’ setting. I changed the Zoom drop-down to 100%. Be sure to hit Ok. Then close Reader or Acrobat and try opening a PDF.
I am now much happier with the experience of opening a PDF. When I open a PDF, it starts off at 100%. You can try different settings to find your preference such as a fixed zoom percentage or ‘Fit Page’, ‘Fit Width’, or ‘Fit Visible’.