Acrobat -- Search & Replace Text in Form Fields

Direct purchase using PayPal ($25 only)!
Similar to my Search & Replace Text in Bookmarks script, you can use this new script to search and replace the text in all the text fields in a single file, and if you have Acrobat Pro you can run this as an Action (AKA Batch Sequence) on multiple files, all for the low price of just $25!

Special offer: You can now get all three "Search & Replace Text" fields (for bookmarks, form fields and comments) for just $60, instead of $75! They can be purchased as a pack here.

IMPORTANT: This tool does not edit the actual static text of a PDF file, only text that is a part of a form field!

Using this script is very easy. You just enter the search term and the replace term:

And all of the matching text in your text fields is edited.

Before:

After:

On top of that, you can even use some basic Regular Expression commands, like \d for a digit, \s for white-spaces, $ as the beginning of the string and ^ for the end of it, etc.

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

Software Recommendation: SnapIt

Just wanted to recommend a handy tool I've been using to create my posts for this website: SnapIt Screen Capture is a handy tool for grabbing and saving screenshots.

You can capture anything you see on your PC screen with SnapIt. It is convenient tool for graphic designers, bloggers who capture and crop images for their posts, for tech writers who need to describe menus and interfaces of applications, web designers and those who work with graphics every day. It captures and auto saves images with one click.

* Supports hotkeys, auto-saving, clipboard
* Automatically copies screenshots to the clipboard
* Tracks capture history, auto-saves captured images
* Saves files in BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG and TIFF formats
* Auto-names captured images

For more information you can visit:
http://www.digeus.com/products/snapit/snapit_screen_capture_3_5.html

Acrobat -- Create Custom Email Links

Direct purchase using PayPal ($30 only)!

Acrobat has a built-in way to create links from email addresses, but the links are all the same and can't be customized in any way.
Using this script you can create email links that change their color when you hover above them with the mouse (from black to blue), and can even be customized to create an email with a certain subject line, CC or BCC addresses, and even the email message body itself.

The PDF file with the text before running the script:

The same file, with the newly created link:

The link as it looks like when hovering over it with the mouse:

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

Acrobat -- Extract Groups of Pages

Direct purchase using PayPal ($30 only)!

Using this tool you can extract repeating groups of pages from your PDF files.
All you have to do is enter the number of pages per new file, and optionally range of pages to process in the original document (the default values are the first and last pages), and the script will take care of the rest.
The new files will be saved in the same folder as the original one.

For example, if you have a 10-page document and you select the following settings:

When the script is done, you'll see that 4 new files were created:

And you can find them in the same location as the original:

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

Acrobat -- Apply Automatic Date Calculation

Direct purchase using PayPal ($50)!
Update: I've created a file that demonstrates how the script works. It can be downloaded from here.

One of the most common tasks when working with date fields is to automatically apply a certain data calculation to a field. For example, you want to have a field with today's date, and then one that automatically shows 4 days after from that date, or 2 weeks or a month, or something similar. This is usually quite complex and time consuming to implement, but no longer...

Using this new tool I've created you can easily select your initial field, the amount of time to add (or subtract!) from it, the target field, the date format to use, and you can even specify to the script to ignore weekends (Saturday and Sunday) or to specify a list of holidays to ignore (this can be useful when calculating working days, for example).

Here's how the tool looks like in Acrobat:

In this case, the result is that the field called "Text3" will automatically have the date of "Text2", plus 5 weeks, unless that date falls on a weekend or one of of the holidays specified in the list. In that case it will be the first following day after that.

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

Acrobat -- Search & Replace Text in Bookmarks

Direct purchase using PayPal ($25 only)!
Using this new script you can search and replace the names of all the bookmarks in a single file, and if you have Acrobat Pro you can run this as an Action (or Batch Sequence) on multiple files, all for the low price of just $25!

Special offer: You can now get all three "Search & Replace Text" fields (for bookmarks, form fields and comments) for just $60, instead of $75! They can be purchased as a pack here.

Using this script is very easy. You just enter the search term and the replace term:

And all of the matching bookmark names are edited.
Before:                              After:

On top of that, you can even use some basic Regular Expression commands, like "\d" for a digit, "\s" for white-spaces, "$" as the beginning of the string and "^" for the end of it, etc.

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

Acrobat -- Validate Required Fields Before Printing or Saving

Direct purchase using PayPal ($40 only)!

If you have a form that contain a set of required fields, they are only useful when the user wants to submit the form back to you. But what if you want to use the required feature of these fields when the form is printed as well? Or when the user tries to save it? Until now you couldn't, but with this script it becomes possible.

After running this script on a file, if someone tries to print it without filling in all the required fields, they will receive an error message and the form will print without any of the data in it. The same can be done when the file is saved.
Important: This tool won't prevent the file from being printed or saved entirely. It will just make sure it doesn't print/save with the partial data in it.

Sample files are available here.

For example, here's a standard form with some required fields:

When the user tries to print the form without filling in all the required fields, they receive this message:

The printed form is blank, but the data they already filled-in is not lost! They can continue editing the form, and when all the fields are filled-in properly, the form will print as usual.

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

Batch Edit Zoom Level in Bookmarks

Direct purchase using PayPal ($50 only)!
Update: You can now test out this tool by downloading this free demo version.
The demo version works exactly like the full version, but it will only process the first 3 (top-level) bookmarks of the first 3 files you select, whereas the full version will process all the bookmarks in an entire folder (and all sub-folders).

With this little yet powerful tool you can edit an entire folder of PDF files within seconds and set all of the zoom level settings in bookmarks actions to one of the following options:

• Inherit Zoom
• Fit Page
• Actual Size
• Fit Width
• Fit Visible

Simply select the folder, set the options you want, and click Run!

The tool can also convert JavaScript actions to a standard "Go to a page in this document"-action.

Note: This application requires Java installed. However, you don't need to have Acrobat on your computer for it to work.

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

Reader -- Display Form Data

Direct purchase using PayPal ($25 only)!
This script can be used to display all of the form data in the file in Adobe Reader.
The output is in plain text, which can be easily copied to another application.

Update: Free demo version now available. It will show the values of up to 3 fields.

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

Acrobat -- Set Initial Layers To Current State

Direct purchase using PayPal ($30 only)!
This script allows you to set the current view state of the layers in the file as the default state when the file is opened.

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

Acrobat -- Filter Comments By Color

Direct purchase using PayPal ($30 only)!
For some reason, Adobe has dropped the option to filter the comments list according to the color of the comment in version X of Acrobat. So I decided to jump to the rescue of those who depended on this feature, or just found it useful, and created a script which allows you to do it once again.
You can select the color you want to filter from a list of pre-defined colors, or just click on a comment with the color you want to use and then select the last option in the list: "Selected Comment Color". The script will then identify this color and will only present comments with the same color.

Here's how it works:
1. Select the comment color you want to see from the list

2. Now only the comments with this color are visible (even in the built-in Comments List!)

3. We remove one of the comments, and now we want to restore the comments we've hidden...

4. We're back to the original situation, with our edits in tact.

It's as simple as that...

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

New Scripts Location for Acrobat 10.1.1

To all of my customers (and everyone else who encounters this issue):
If you've installed scripts into the user-context folder of Acrobat X, which are:
On Windows XP:

C:\Documents and Settings\(username)\Application Data\Adobe\Acrobat\10.0\JavaScripts

On Vista or Windows 7:

C:\Users\(username)\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Acrobat\10.0\JavaScripts

And then updated to Acrobat 10.1.1, these scripts will no longer work, due to a change in Acrobat's folder structure.

To resolve this issue, move the scripts to the following folder:
On Windows XP:

C:\Documents and Settings\(username)\Application Data\Adobe\Acrobat\Privileged\10.0\JavaScripts

On Vista or Windows 7:

C:\Users\(username)\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Acrobat\Privileged\10.0\JavaScripts

If this folder doesn't exist, you can either create it yourself, or place the script in this folder instead:

C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 10.0\Acrobat\JavaScripts

or

C:\Program Files(x86)\Adobe\Acrobat 10.0\Acrobat\JavaScripts

(My thanks to the Acrobat Ninja for the info related to this problem)

Acrobat -- Create Popup Images

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

This script will make your standard PDF file much more dynamic and interactive.
It allows you to insert "popup" images that appear whenever the user clicks a certain phrase, or even just hovers with the mouse above it! The image disappears when the mouse is clicked again, or moved away, respectively.

For example, let's say you have some figures in your file. Instead of linking to them on a different page, why not have the appropriate figure pop up whenever the user moves the mouse above the words "figure 1", "figure 2", etc.
The same can be done with products, people's names, tables, screenshots of websites, or whatever... Even pages from another PDF!

How it works:
1. You create a plain-text file (semi-colon delimited) that specifies the phrases and the image to associate with them. For example, it can be:

Figure 1;C:\My Images\Figure1.jpg
Figure 2;C:\My Images\Figure2.gif
Figure 3;C:\My Images\Figure3.png
Figure 4;C:\My Images\Figure4.jpg

2. You then select the properties of the links that display the images (border width, style and color, among other things), in this dialog:

3. The images and links are then automatically added to the file.
If you choose to do so, a check-box will be added to the top left corner of the first page which will prevent the images from popping up, unless checked.
Also, if you choose that option, a report will be presented at the end, specifying how many images were added, and to which pages.

You can download a sample file from here, which shows how the script works.

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

Acrobat -- Batch Combine Even-Odd Pages

Direct purchase using PayPal ($70 per license)!

This script is similar to my original script for interleaving two PDF files (see: http://try67.blogspot.com/2008/12/acrobat-combine-even-odd-pages.html), but it works as a batch process and can combine entire folders at the same time.

Basically, you select the folder that contains the odd pages (1, 3, 5, etc.) and the one containing the even pages (2, 4, 6, etc.) and then the output folder, and the script will interleave all files with the same name in both folder and will save the combined file in the output folder.

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

Acrobat -- Batch Watermark A PDF File

Direct purchase using PayPal ($75 per license)!

With this new and powerful tool one can create multiple copies of the same file, each one watermarked with the text of your choice from a list.

IMPORTANT: If you don't have Acrobat, or are interested in a more powerful version, suitable for processing large amounts of files), there's also a standalone version of this tool available here.

UPDATE: Now available, a free DEMO version of this tool. This version will process up to 3 items in your list, adding the watermark text to the top-left corner of the first page of the document, with a fixed font style and size.

For example, let's say you want to distribute a movie script to multiple people, and want to stamp each copy with the name of the recipient, to prevent the script from being leaked. You create a list of all the people in the production team, like so:

You then open your script and run the tool from the Tools menu.
You select your list and set the properties of the watermark text:

As you can see, you can set various options regarding the location and style of the text, as well as which pages to watermark and under which name to save the watermarked files.
The tool will proceed to create watermarked copies of the file, one for each item in the input file.

The result:

The folder with the watermarked files (notice the file names):

One of the watermarked files:

Later on, the files can be secured using a batch process to ensure that the watermarked texts can not be edited.

Note: This is not actually a batch process, so you don't have to have Acrobat Pro to use this tool. Any version of Acrobat will do.

You can download the sample PDF files and Names list shown above from here.

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