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.

Batch Change Bookmarks Type (FREE)

This small tool will convert the bookmarks created by combining PDF files to "regular" bookmarks, like those created using Ctrl+B or using a script.

I'm offering this tool FOR FREE: Download now!

The app looks like this:

This is the bookmarks panel of a file before running the tool on it. The first three bookmarks were created when the file was combined, and the last one was created manually. Notice they have different icons.

This is the same file, after being processed with the tool.
All bookmarks are now of the same kind.

If you find this tool useful and would like to donate, it's always appreciated!

Acrobat -- Populate Form Data from URL

Batch version: Buy Now ($60 only)
Non-batch version: Buy Now ($40 only)
Direct purchase using PayPal!


PDF files have various Open Parameter options: you can link to a PDF at a specific page, named destination, zoom level, etc. You can even use a FDF file to populate form data, but this requires having such a file available on your server. It's easier to just do it directly from the URL, which is where this script comes into play.

With this new script created by me you can create a hyperlink to a PDF file, which will also populate it with some pre-defined values, using a simple URL parameter, like so:

http://www.myserver.com/files/products.pdf?rawdata=firstname:John;lastname:Smith

When the reader opens the file in their browser using this link, the form fields ("firstname" and "lastname", in this case) will automatically be populated with the data in the URL ("John" and "Smith", resp.).

IMPORTANT: The script will only work if the file is opened inside the browser window and using the Adobe PDF plugin.

Using the batch version of this script you can apply the code to multiple files in the same process (if you have Acrobat Pro, of course).

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

Acrobat -- Merge Files For Duplex Printing

Direct purchase using PayPal ($40 only)!

If you want to combine files for Duplex printing, but want to make sure that each new file starts on a new page, this is the tool for you.
It consists of a batch process that selects the files to be combined and a script that combines the files (in alphabetical order), adding blank pages where necessary to make sure that each file will begin on a new page when printing in Duplex mode.

For more information about this tool, or if you're interested in purchasing it, you can contact me directly.

Acrobat -- Move Field Precisely (FREE)

This tool is available for free: Download now!

Placing form fields in Acrobat can sometimes be a challenge, especially if you want to achieve precise results, which is why I created this tool.
It allows you to select a form field (only one at the moment), and then move it a precise amount of points in whichever direction you want. You can also manually specify the exact coordinates of the field.

After selecting the field...

You can specify in which direction to move it...

and by how much...

Or, you can manually view and edit its coordinates:

For more information about this tool you can contact me directly, and if you find this tool useful and would like to donate, it's always appreciated!