Tuesday, April 25, 2017

Acrobat -- Populate Fields From Dropdown




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Update (25/04/2017): Since many forms are now used on mobile devices I've updated this tool so that it will produce files that work on an iPad, using Readdle's PDF Expert app, which currently offers the best support for scripts on that platform.

This tool allows you to set-up one of the most commonly requested features in PDF forms, a drop-down field that populates other fields with data when a selection is made it in.

It makes the entire process very easy and simple to do. All you have to have are the PDF form with the form fields, and the data organized in a spreadsheet with the field-names in the first row. That's it!

And it's even possible to use it multiple times in the same file, using different data files, without any conflicts between the different fields...

For example, let's say we have all of this data in an Excel spreadsheet that we want to import into our PDF:
The original data file (click to enlarge)
 We just need to save it as a tab-delimited text file (which is one of the built-in options in the Excel Save As dialog).
We then open our PDF file (notice the names of the form fields match those in the header row of the Excel file), and click the button that tool adds to Acrobat:


Now we select the input text file we created before, and then specify the "main" drop-down, the one the will populate the other fields when its value is changed:

That's it! We can now see that the drop-down list is populated with all of the names from the "Name" column in our original data file:


And when we make a selection in the drop-down, the other fields are immediately updated with the relevant data from that row:



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

Wednesday, April 19, 2017

Acrobat -- Insert Blank Page


Direct purchase using PayPal ($30 only)!


Update (19-04-2014): Another new feature! It's now possible to specify the dimensions of the blank page(s) you're adding with a simple dialog that appears when you select where to add them.


The dialog allows you to enter the desired width and height of the page, in either Inches, Millimeters, or PostScript Points.

Update (17-10-2014): I just added a brand new and powerful feature to this tool! You can now insert multiple blank pages after every X amount of pages into your file. So not just a single page as before, now you can insert many pages in seconds.

With this script you can insert a new blank page to you PDF files with a single click! The size of the pages will match the size of the other pages in your files.
You can choose from the following options:
  • Insert a blank page at the beginning of the file
  • Insert a blank page at the end of the file
  • Insert a blank page before the current page
  • Insert a blank page after the current page
  • Insert a blank page after/before every X pages
When installed, the tool adds a menu button to Acrobat with these options:

(click to enlarge)

If you select the last option you're presented with this dialog where you can define how and where to insert the blank page(s) you want to add to the file:


The results can be seen in the Pages panel on the left:

(click to enlarge)

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