For those of you interested in scripting PDF Portfolios with the new Acrobat JavaScript “Collection” Object, I’ve created a few example utility scripts to demonstrate the features of the new object.

There are now five basic utility scripts bundled into the one, each one demonstrates a different aspect of working with PDF Portfolios or what the API calls “Collections”. To keep things simple, I’ve copied my earlier posts about my Portfolio Utilities to this page. The new feature that allows you to change the initial view of a Portfolio is at the bottom of the post.

I just updated the The Web Designer’s Guide to Acrobat with new information about detecting if the Reader or Acrobat plugin is installed. Withthe recent changes in Lion, plugin detection is more important than ever to ensure a good user experience. I also updated the section on embedding PDF in the browser.

Jump to The Web Designer’s Guide to Acrobat

For those of you interested in scripting PDF Portfolios with the new Acrobat JavaScript “Collection” Object, I’ve created a few example utility scripts to demonstrate the features of the new object.

There are now four basic utility scripts bundled into the one, each one demonstrates a different aspect of working with PDF Portfolios or what the API calls “Collections”. To keep things simple, I’ve copied my earlier posts about my Portfolio Utilities to this page. If you are just interested in the new feature you can

The Acrobat X Software Developer Kit (SDK) is a set of tools that help you develop software that interacts with Acrobat technology. The SDK contains header files, type libraries, simple utilities, sample code, and documentation.

Using the Acrobat SDK, you can develop software that integrates with Acrobat and Adobe Reader in several ways:

• JavaScript — Write scripts, either in an individual PDF document or externally, to extend the functionality of Acrobat or Adobe Reader.
• Plug-ins — Create plug-ins that are dynamically linked to and extend the functionality of Acrobat or Adobe Reader.
• Interapplication Communication — Write a separate application process that uses interapplication communication (IAC) to control Acrobat functionality. DDE and OLE are supported on Microsoft® Windows®, and Apple events/AppleScript on Mac OS®. IAC is not available on UNIX®.

The Acrobat SDK provides support for development on both Windows and Apple Mac OS environments.

Read the full Acrobat X SDK Overview
Download the Acrobat X SDK

Great and Powerful Wizard of Scripting otherwise known as Thom Parker of pdfscripting.com explains everything you wanted to know about stamps in PDF and then takes it to the next level in a new video “Stamps Gone Wild”.

If Stamps in Acrobat are a mystery to you or if you are thinking of using an Acrobat clone that claims to support stamp annotations, you’ve got to see this video.

Watch “Stamps Gone Wild”

I wanted to take a moment to introduce 3 new people who’ve joined the Adobe Acrobat User Community’s Experts team at AcrobatUsers.com. If you’re not already a member, you should be, it’s free and probably the best and fastest way to get those difficult or obscure questions answered. I’ve found it extremely helpful myself… and I have access to the engineering team!

Here’s another tool for those of you interested in playing video inside of Acrobat.

The standard Video Tool in Acrobat 9 allows you embed a single video the PDF file or stream it from a URL and allows you to play a video in your PDF file. But what if you wanted to play more than one? What if you wanted to embed a small, low resolution video but provide the option to stream an HD version with the click of a button. Using the default video player, you would need to add separate widgets which may not be the behavior you really want.

The Video Player Plus Widget for Acrobat allows you to…

• Embed multiple videos in the same video widget
• Programmatically switch between the embedded videos and streaming content
• Programmatically switch between embedded player skins
• Programmatically change the skin color and behavior

You can even use the Video Player Plus Widget to replace the default video player that ships with Adobe Acrobat 9.

I got this request yesterday from one of my co-workers.

A form author has 10 items. Let’s say it’s “Ice Cream flavors”…chocolate, strawberry, vanilla,… He wants the form recipients to rank them from most to least favorite. But, he wants to prevent the user from giving two flavors the same rank.

There can’t be two most favorites… unless you’re talking about your children… or dogs in my case.

I knew that this could be done with some pretty heavy script to check all of the fields and build an array of values, compare them, and a bunch of other stuff that I didn’t exactly feel like writing.

The Navigator SDK for PDF Portfolio Layouts is finally out of beta and is available for download. Samples, updated documentation and other resources are available in the Acrobat 9.1 SDK August 2009 update. You can get it by following the link below.

A few months back I posted an article introducing
Joel’s Redaction Utilities.
For those of you still unfamiliar with what redaction is I’ll quote from that article…

One of the ways that Adobe Acrobat 9 can help you control your work is to make it easier to remove sensitive information before distributing it outside your organization. For those of you not in the legal profession, this is called redaction. Redaction is designed to permanently remove from the document all content that is being redacted and to put an indicator that this happened in it’s place.

 

The way that redaction works in Acrobat 9 is that you first create redaction marks which doesn’t remove any content and then after you have worked your way through the document completely, you apply those redactions and the information is remove and replaced with, usually black, boxes and optionally codes that indicate the reason the information was removed.

 

If you’ve spent any time in Acrobat SDK land, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the redaction markup is just special type of annotation.

Well – Rick Borstein, the guy behind the Acrobat for Legal Professionals blog asked me to create another example to show how you can use Acrobat JavaScript to streamline repetitive tasks like applying redaction codes to a set of reaction annotations. Typically, you’d need to open up each redaction annotation’s properties dialog to change or set the redaction code one at a time. With just a few lines of JavaScript, you can dramatically reduce the number of steps.