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.

It seems like I get a new question about playing video in PDF files every day. Adding dynamic content to PDF files seems to be catching on. Here’s the question… paraphrased for clarity.

I’d like to put a video on page one that opens in a floating window and use a button to start it from anywhere in the document.

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.

I’ve been getting a lot of questions lately from developers who want to use the new Rich Media Annotations (RMA) in their PDF files but are having trouble migrating from the legacy MediaPlayer objects. The main problem is that they want to be able to toggle the visibility of an RMA but can’t; RMAs don’t have a "visibility" property like the MediaPlayer object does.

…but it works just fine in the browser. What’s wrong?

Have you ever wanted to pre-populate a few form fields in a PDF file without using a server tool like the FDF Toolkit; just something quick and dirty? Well – with a clever use of Acrobat JavaScript, the URL property of the doc object you can do just about anything including fill form fields based on a URL’s query string.

I don’t know if you guys are hearing this as well, but I’ve started running into problems where Acrobat forms (AcroForms, not XFA) are being filled out by Mac OS X and sent back to folks with Acrobat and the fields appear blank until you click into them.

UPDATED 10/05/2011 – Now works with Acrobat X, Version 10.1.1 Fixed the error message popping up for each field.

UPDATED 1/28/2011 – The script has been updated to work with Acrobat X. Because the “Document” menu no longer exists, I move the script to load under the “Edit” menu.

UPDATED 3/18/2010 – There’s been some confusion about when to use this tool so I added some code to test if Mac Preview.app was the last application to save the PDF file. If not, the menu item will be greyed out.

UPDATED 3/17/2010 – I added some additional code to not add the menu item if the script is running in the Adobe Reader and to be greyed out if there are no form fields on the document.

UPDATED 2/18/2010 – I fixed the “An internal error occurred” bug. Give it another shot if you’ve had problems.

If you’ve started to work with the new Acrobat ActionScript API for creating custom PDF Portfolio navigators you’ll quickly come to a point where you may want to do some debugging. Unfortunately, the current Acrobat 9 application doesn’t provide a true debugging environment. However, you can see errors and get a pretty good understanding of what’s going on by simply outputting some trace() statements. Error reporting and trace() is off by default but you can turn it on by adding the following settings to the Windows registry:

I recently updated “Joel’s PDF Portfolio Utilities” to include the ability to combine multiple portfolios into one.

Combine All Open PDF Portfolios:
This script will look at all of the open PDF files to see which are PDF Portfolios meaning the collection object returns a value. Then, it will combine all the open PDF Portfolios into a single new PDF Portfolio that contains all the files and metadata from the sources. This version will not maintain folder structure so it’s best to use on PDF Portfolios that do not contain folders. Creating a new PDF Portfolio through app.newCollection() is a privileged function so you’ll need to wrap it in a trustedFunction to make it work, the code snippet below shows how.

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.