You can cause an action to occur when abookmark or link is clicked, or when a page is viewed. For example,you can use links and bookmarks to jump to different locations ina document, execute commands from a menu, and perform other actions.Actions are set in the Properties dialog box.
- JavaScript is the cross-platform scripting language of the Adobe Acrobat family of products that includes Acrobat Professional, Acrobat Standard, and Adobe Reader. Through JavaScript extensions, the viewer application and its plug-ins expose much of their functionality to document authors, form designers, and plug-in developers.
- Scripting is a powerful tool that can be used to control and automate many features of many Adobe ® applications—saving you so much time and effort that it can completely change the way you approach.
For bookmarks or links, you specify an action that occurs whenthe bookmark or link is clicked. For other items, such as pages,media clips and form fields, you define a trigger that causes theaction to occur and then define the action itself. You can add multipleactions to one trigger.
Free Sample PDF Files with scripts. Email addresses are acquired from text fields on the form, from drop lists, and from multi-select lists. Dynamically Modify Email Submit Address in a LiveCycle (XFA) Form This LiveCycle Form sample includes 3 examples of different ways to modify the email submit address.
TheLocked option prevents the appearance and actions associatedwith an object from being accidentally changed.
Add an action to bookmarks, formfields, buttons, or clips
Using the Hand tool, right-click the bookmark, and choose Properties.
Using the Tools > Rich Media > Select Object tool, double-click the link, media clip, or form field, and choose Properties.
From the Select Action menu, select the action type to occur, and then click Add. You can add multiple actions; actions execute in the order that they appear in the Actions list box.
(Optional) Select an action in the Actions tab, and use the buttons to reorder, edit, or delete the action.
Click OK to accept the actions. To close the Rich Media tool, click the cross icon at the right-end of the toolbar.
To enhance the interactive quality of a document,you can specify actions, such as changing the zoom value, to occurwhen a page is opened or closed.
Select the page thumbnail corresponding to the page, and choose Page Properties from the options menu .
From the Select Trigger menu, choose Page Open to set an action when the page opens, or choose Page Close to set an action when the page closes.
Choose an action from the Select Action menu, and click Add.
Specify the options for the action, and click OK. The options available depend on the action selected.
To create a series of actions, choose another action from the menu, and click Add again. Use the Up and Down buttons to arrange the actions in the order you want them to occur.
Note:
If you set an action that switches to FullScreen view on Page Open or Page Close, the next timethe same page opens or closes, Full Screen viewis turned on.
Close all opened dialog boxes, if any. Click the cross icon at the right-end of the toolbar to close the tool.
Youcan assign the following actions to links, bookmarks, pages, mediaclips, and form fields:
Executesa specified menu command as the action.
Jumps to the specified 3D view.
Jumpsto the specified destination in the current document or in anotherdocument.
Bringsin form data from another file, and places it in the active form.
Executes a specified action for a multimedia object in thefile (such as playing a sound file). The multimedia object mustbe added to the file before you can specify an action for it.
Plays a specified movie that was created as Acrobat 6-compatible.The specified movie must be embedded in a PDF document.
Follows an article thread in the activedocument or in another PDF document.
Runs the specified JavaScript.
Sends the form data to the specifiedURL.
You can use the following triggers for media clipsand form fields (not links or bookmarks):
When the page containing the media clip is moved out of view.
When the page containing the media clip becomes the currentpage.
When a user leaves the page that contains the media clip.
When the pointer enters the field or play area.
When the pointer exits the field or play area.
When the link area receives focus, either through a mouseaction or tabbing.
When the focus moves to a different link area.
Acrobat Pro is required to use JavaScript with forms and action wizards.
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Adobe Acrobat Pdf Scripting
This is a bit longer than usual, so let me add a table of contents here that allows you to jump straight to the section you are interested in.
JavaScript in Acrobat
Programming JavaScript for Acrobat is simple: Just use the JavaScript core language, avoid any browser specific extensions to the JavaScript language and become familiar with the Acrobat JavaScript API…
… that is if you are already a JavaScript expert, and know where exactly the boundary between the core language and these browser specific extensions are.
So let’s take a step back and see how one can learn to program in JavaScript for Acrobat from scratch.
What is JavaScript?
Back in the early days of the World Wide Web, JavaScript was created in 1995 as an extension language for the Netscape browser. If you want to learn more about it’s history, feel free to explore the JavaScript Wikipedia page.
Since then, it came a long way, and left it’s browser-only heritage behind. It is now available for a number of different environments. Adobe uses it as it’s “ExtendScript” to automate different Creative Cloud applications (Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, …), but also in Adobe Acrobat (and that’s very likely why you are here, reading this blog post). Any JavaScript implementation consists of two parts:
- The JavaScript “core” language
- Application specific extensions
All JavaScript implementations have the first part in common, and as long as we ignore changes over time in that core language part, any script written with just these core language elements should run in any JavaScript environment. It covers the syntax of the language, basic types like numbers and booleans, and more complex types like strings or arrays, but also “library” objects like Date, RegEx and JSON, so when you have to perform date calculations for example, you can do this by just looking up what methods the Date object provides.
On top of this core language, to actually interact with the application that is hosting the JavaScript environment (web browser, Adobe Acrobat, Node.js server, …) we need to add some application specific “stuff” to the mix. And this is where things differ completely between different JavaScript environments. JavaScript running in the browser knows about web pages, and elements on a web page, HTML connections, and more web specific things, whereas the Acrobat environment does not care about these things, but knows about PDF documents, annotations, form fields and more things that are important in the world of PDF.
Learning the JavaScript Core Language
So, to learn JavaScript for Acrobat, you just take any introductory JavaScript book, class or tutorial and just read and learn the parts about the core language, and ignore the rest. Unfortunately it’s not that simple: Most training resources for JavaScript assume that you are trying to learn to program for the browser environment, so they mix information that belongs into the core language portion with how the script actually interacts with the browser. This can be simple things like how the script is stored: When you write for the browser, chances are that your script actually lives in an HTML document. To interact with the user, your training resource assumes you can get information from the user by using the “prompt()” method, and present information by modifying the current HTML page.
All this makes it a bit more challenging to learn JavaScript for just Adobe Acrobat and the PDF environment.
There is nothing wrong to just take a JavaScript book, start on page 1 and work through the book, following all examples, and actually using the browser to experiment and develop. The problem comes when you then have to unlearn the things you just worked so hard to learn in order to switch to the Acrobat environment.
I am only aware of a couple of resources that provide a fairly clean breakdown of just the core language (that does not mean that there are not more, but I have not seen them. If you know of one, please post in the comments):
- Kyle Simpson: You Don’t Know JS: Up & Going
This is the first part of a multi-volume series about JavaScript. This first part is available as a free ebook from iTunes and directly from the publisher O’Reilly. Here are the two links: iTunes – O’Reilly
Flanagan’s book is the definitive guide, with a large chapter about the core language, but it’s a bit dry and probably not well suited for somebody who is just starting out. For a programmer with a good foundation in any other programming language, this would be a great resource. Simpson’s book is a short introduction into the core language. You can run all the examples from both books in Acrobat if you keep a few simple rules in mind:
Differences (console.log)
Acrobat’s JavaScript console object does not support the log() method. Instead of console.log(“abc”); you will have to use console.println(“abc”);.
This will work in most cases, but the log() method is a bit more powerful than Acrobat’s println(), so you may end up with a few examples for which you will have to modify the arguments to the log call (even though I did not find any when I browsed through the examples in both books):
console.log() concatenates it’s arguments
This will print the line “abc def” – it will concatenate the individual strings. This also works with variables:
This will print “My first car was a Dodge Charger”.
To implement this with Acrobat’s println(), you would use the normal JavaScript string concatenation:
I had to add a space at the end of the first string to get the same output as with log().
console.log() allows substitution strings
This can be rewritten using Acrobat’s util.printf().
In addition to the console.log() function, you also need to change all instances of alert() and prompt() as explained below.
More Books
For any other resource, you have to take the examples presented, and covert them to what Acrobat expects you to use. I’ve looked at two more books that seem to give a reasonably good introduction into the core language, but you will have to pick and choose which areas you need to skip.
In these books (and probably most other JavaScript books), the JavaScript examples are wrapped in HTML, and you have to identify where the script is, extract it and then potentially modify it to make it run within Acrobat. Here is an example of what you might find:
You can open this as example_1.html and see what it does in your browser.
The only thing that is interesting for us is the text inside the <script> tag – that is everything between <script> and </script>:
How do we run this code in Acrobat?
Now that we have the script we need to run, how do we run it in Acrobat’s JavaScript console? Thom Parker already did an excellent job explaining this Acrobat feature, so there is no need to do this again.
Here is his tutorial about how to run code in Acrobat’s JavaScript console: https://acrobatusers.com/tutorials/javascript_console
More Differences (alert and prompt)
When we try to run the above line of code, Acrobat will report an error on the JavaScript console:
In this console log, we have four lines: The first line is the one that was executed, the second line gives us an error message, the third line tells us where the error occurred, and the last line shows the return value of what we’ve executed. The message “undefined” sounds bad, that that’s actually what we would expect when running a command that does not return a value – or in this case, when JavaScript command we were trying to run failed.
The JavaScript interpreter is telling us that “alert is not defined”. This is one of these differences between the application specific extensions that sneaks into the description of the core language: Every web browser will display an alert message box when this line of JavaScript gets executed, but Acrobat does not know about the alert() function. Acrobat does however provide very similar functionality via the app.alert() method. See the description in the SDK documentation for more information. We can use the simplest form of app.alert() to replace the alert() call in our example:
After executing this line, a window pops up:
And, I get this in the JavaScript console:
Adobe Pdf Scripting
The first line again is the code I am executing, the second line shows the return value of what got executed. From the API documentation (see link above), we learn that a return code of “1” means that the “OK” button was pressed (which is actually the only button that was on our dialog, but the app.alert() method allows to add more than just one button).
This takes care of informing the user about what our program did. Often there is also a requirement to ask the user for input. In a web browser, the JavaScript program would use the prompt() function, which again does not exist in Acrobat (this is example2.html):
And just as before, the code we are interested in is within the <script> tag:
We already know what to do with the second line, to replace the prompt() function call with something that Acrobat understands, we will use the app.response() method. For more information about this method, see the Acrobat JavaScript API Reference.
This results in these two windows being displayed:
Any time a script references window or document, we are dealing with a script that cannot be easily be converted to Acrobat’s JavaScript.
A Book Just About JavaScript for Adobe Acrobat
If you are looking for a book that only talks about JavaScript for Acrobat, and also introduces you to how these scripts are used in Acrobat, take a look at John Deubert’s Beginning JavaScript for Adobe Acrobat
Further Steps
Adobe Intro To Scripting.pdf
Once you have a good understanding of the core language, you need to become familiar with how JavaScript is used in Acrobat. A good introduction is the document “Developing Acrobat Applications Using JavaScript” in the Acrobat SDK, followed by the dry but necessary “JavaScript for Acrobat API Reference“.
If you need any help in learning JavaScript, or in how it is used with and in Adobe Acrobat, keep in mind that I do run a consulting business and part of what I do is to provide training.
Full disclosure: Some of the links to books on this page use my Amazon affiliate link, so when you order through one of these links, I will get a few cents.