Acrobat/Reader -- Unlock All Comments (FREE)

Some PDF files (like those generated by Acrobat when using the Compare Documents command) have locked comments that can't be edited or removed. You can use this simple (and FREE) script to unlock all of these comments with a single click, and then you'll be able to edit them, unless there's a security policy that prevents it.

This script can be used in both Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader.
You can download it here.

Here's how it looks like in Reader:

The original file with the locked comments. Notice the padlock icon next to each one on the right.

The same file after running the script on it from its menu item in the Tools panel.

The resulting file. All the padlock icons are gone, and I was able to delete the first highlight on the page.

As always, if you have any questions about this tool, or any other tool I've developed, you can contact me directly, and if you find this tool useful and would like to donate, it's always appreciated!

Acrobat/Reader -- Move Comment Popups To The Edge (FREE)

A user's request on the Adobe Forums prompted me to create this small utility that allows you to move all of the comment popups windows to the side of the page where they are located with a single click. This script can be used in both Acrobat and the free Reader.

The script can be downloaded (for FREE) from here.

Here's a page with a couple of comments that obscure the text. You can see the button the script added on the right, under the Extended panel:

And here's the same page after clicking that button. The popups have been moved out of the way, and then page is much less cluttered now:

As always, if you have any questions about this tool, or any other tool I've developed, you can contact me directly, and if you find this tool useful and would like to donate, it's always appreciated!

Acrobat -- Print Multiple Pages Per Sheet

Direct purchase using PayPal ($40 only per license)!

Update (16/02/2021): Now available, a free DEMO version of this tool, that will print up to 3 pages.

Update (12/09/2016): It's now possible to specify any custom page size you wish!

The new script dialog, with the custom page size option

One of the biggest differences between using Adobe Acrobat on a Windows computer and on a Mac is that the virtual Adobe PDF printer is not available on the latter. This means that the option to print a multiple pages from a PDF file to a single sheet is not available to Mac users, which is a shame as it is very handy when you want to create a summary or a hand-out.

This problem is now easily solved using my latest tool, which allows anyone to print as many pages as they want to a single page. And after printing you can save the generated file as a new PDF, so you don't have just a physical copy of it, but a digital one as well!

Here's how it works. After purchasing and installing the script a new option is added to the File menu, just under the Print command (the screenshots below are from a Windows machine, but it will be the same on a Mac, of course):

The new menu item under File (click to enlarge)

You're then prompted to select which pages to print, as well as the layout of the generated pages, their paper size, whether to include the page borders on the print-out and whether to close the new file after it's printed:

The settings dialog of the script

When you press OK in the dialog above, the new file is created and the Print dialog is automatically opened, ready to print the newly created file (notice that there are 4 original pages on the first page in the preview):

The Print dialog with multiple pages per sheet

After you printed the file, if you didn't select to close it automatically, you will be able to save it, edit it, sent it to others, etc., just like any other PDF.

The resulting file

For more information about this tool, you can contact me directly.

Acrobat -- Spell Check Suite

Direct purchase using PayPal ($85 only per license)!

Try before you buy: Free demo version

This suite of tools adds full spell-checking capabilities to Acrobat.
You can now check and mark up regular text and bookmarks in addition to the standard check for form fields and comments which already exists in Acrobat.

Update IV (25-08-2016): New update for this tool! It can now handle ligatures symbols as well as end-of-line hyphenated words better than before.

Update III (18-06-2014): A new feature just added to this tool, allowing you to define "No Spell Check" zones, which the tool will ignore when it spell-checks the document.
Another improvement is the option to define whether or not to perform a case-sensitive spell-check. By default the check is case in-sensitive.

Update II: Now this script includes a batch process, which allows you to spell-check multiple files one after another (provided you have Acrobat Pro, of course).

Update I: A free demo version of this tool is now available here. It allows you to select a dictionary and then spell-check the first page of the currently active document.

The languages available for checking are:

• Bulgarian
• Catalan
• Croatian
• Czech
• Danish
• Dutch
• English (Canada)
• English (United Kingdom)
• English (United States)
• Estonian
• Finnish
• French (Canada)
• French (France)
• German (Germany)
• German (Switzerland)
• Greek
• Hungarian
• Italian
• Latvian
• Lithuanian
• Norwegian Bokmål
• Norwegian Nynorsk
• Polish
• Portuguese (Brazil)
• Portuguese (Portugal)
• Romanian
• Russian
• Slovak
• Slovenian
• Spanish
• Swedish
• Turkish

In Acrobat X or later the following languages are also available:

• Arabic
• Hebrew

The main menu of the suite looks like this:

The language dictionary selection looks like this:

Each of these dictionaries can be customized: Words can be added and removed from it, either using a simple input dialog or through a file (which allows adding or removing multiple words in one go).

When you run spell-check a document, the misspelled words are underlined and the suggestions for the correct spelling are added to the highlight:

Update: Added functionality to check just a part of the document. This is ideal if you have a single document consisting of multiple languages. You simply add "Spell Checking Zones" to your document, and only the words within those zones will be checked.

Here's how such a zone looks like (notice that only the misspelled words inside the zone were marked):

 

IMPORTANT NOTE:  This tool does NOT offer a way of fixing the found spelling mistakes, it just marks them on the page. To do so you would need to go back to the original file format and fix it there, or manually use the Edit Text command in Acrobat (not recommended, but possible).

If you have any questions regarding this tool, contact me directly.

Acrobat -- Move Pages From X To Y

Direct purchase using PayPal ($20 only per license)!
Fed up of moving PDF pages around in Adobe Acrobat by clicking them, holding down, dragging up or down the Pages list, hoping you manage to get it to scroll and then praying you don't drop them in the wrong spot? Well, no more!
Using this new tool I've developed you can easily and quickly move around one page, or a whole range of pages, from point X to point Y in your file.

When you run the script just enter which page(s) to move, and where to move them to, and you're done! It's as easy as that.

Here's how it looks like:

Moving one page down the file

Moving a range of pages up the file

If you have any questions regarding this tool, you can contact me directly.

Acrobat / Reader -- Enlarge Comment Lines

Direct purchase using PayPal ($50 only per license)!
Recently, the lines in the comments in Adobe Acrobat and Adobe (Acrobat) Reader became minuscule, making it very difficult to spot them on the page. With this tool you can make them all big again, with a single click.
The tool can be used in both applications and will edit the lines of the comment types:

• Strikeout
• Replace Text
• Underline
• Squiggly

It can be run on all the comments in the entire file, or on just the selected comments (it will ignore comments from other types), or on all the comments in the current page.

For example, let's say we have these 4 comments on the page. Their default appearance is quite small, as can be seen, so we click the script's button to enlarge them (can be seen under the Tools panel on the right):

And the results are much more visible:

If you have any questions regarding this tool, you can contact me directly.

Acrobat / Reader -- Print Every X Page

Direct purchase using PayPal ($30 only per license)!
Important: This script is only compatible with Acrobat/Reader version XI or higher!

This new tool allows you to easily print a subset of pages in a PDF file that you can't otherwise do, either in Adobe Acrobat or in Adobe (Acrobat) Reader.
Let's say you want to print every third page in a 800-page file. Instead of manually entering the page numbers into the Print dialog of the application (and then discovering it will only accept 100 characters!), you can use this tool to easily and quickly generate the pages list that you want to print.

So here we have a file with 805 pages and we want to print each 3rd page, starting from page 5 and ending with page 800, for example:

The file we want to print and the new button added by the script, in Adobe Acrobat

As you can see, the script added a new button to the Tools menu on the right.
If you use it in Reader it will be added under the Extended panel:

The same file and the script's button, as it appears in Adobe Reader

So we now click the button, and this dialog box appears:

The script's dialog window

In this box we can specify which X page to print or not to print (in this case we want to print every third page, so we enter "3"), and from which page number to start printing (page 5, in this case) and until which page number to print (page 800). The default values are every second page, printing from the first to the last pages.

After we click OK the Print dialog appears, with the correct page numbers filled in:

The Print dialog with the start of the Pages list, starting with 5

The end of the Pages list, ending with 800

All we have to do now is select the other printing options we want to use and click on Print, and we're done!

If we want to print every page except for the third pages then we can select the second option in the first drop-down menu in the dialog window:

The result is the following pages list:

If you have any questions regarding this tool, you can contact me directly.

Convert JavaScript Links To Real Links

Direct purchase using PayPal ($40 only per license, both tools included)!
Update (25/07/2016): Now also available, a similar tool that converts JavaScript links to a page (using the this.pageNum-property) to "real" go-to-page links that point to the same page number.
This tool allows you to select whether to convert links, fields or bookmarks. It looks like this:

Update: Now available are demo versions of both tools, which will process up to 3 files, 3 pages per file and 3 links per page. You can download them from here.

Using the tool you can convert links with a JavaScript action to launch a web-site (using the app.launchURL()-method) to "real" web-links that point to the same URL.
This can be handy because JavaScript code in Acrobat can not create this type of links, only links with JS-code.

These tools run independently of Acrobat and can process an entire folder of PDF files (and all sub-folders) in a single go.

If you have any questions regarding this tool, you can contact me directly.