[This blog post appeared first on my professional site at KHKonsulting.com]

A New Version of Acrobat

Have you noticed that it’s been more than two years since the release of Adobe Acrobat 9? Usually, Adobe releases a new version every 18 to 24 months, so a new version has been overdue. Today they let the cat out of the bag, and announced Acrobat X. There is already a lot of information available about what it is, and to some extend also how it is different from previous releases.

Take a look at the press release to get a quick overview of what’s new, or browse over two Adobe TV and watch the Acrobat X Tips & Tricks episodes. There is a lot of information available to give you a pretty good idea about what’s new and different.

User Interface

If you’ve attended one of my training seminars about Acrobat, you know that one of my pet peeves has always been that Adobe added to the UI clutter with every new release of Acrobat. Yes, every now and then they tried to clean it up, but at the end, it just caused more and more confusion among both novice, but also experienced users.

This time around, they took a completely new approach and ripped out the old menu and toolbar system and replaced it with something completely new. I am still trying to wrap my head around where things are now located, but in general, the new layout is a good idea. It will be much easier for the novice user to explore the UI and find new features that they might want to use, but for users who’ve worked with Acrobat since the early days of the product (in my case since Acrobat 3), it will take a while until we find all the tools that we’ve known by heart. But in the long run, I think it’s a good move, and I am more than willing to go through the learning process to get to know the new UI.

Plug-Ins

Every time Acrobat changed it’s UI in the past, there were major ripple effects through the plug-in community – things just did not work anymore, or not quite right, and we plug-in developers had some work to do to modify our plug-ins so that users could rely on these 3rd party components again.

If you have not yet tested your own plug-ins on an Acrobat X pre-release, don’t waste any time. Chances are that your code needs to be modified to work seamlessly with Acrobat X. If you need help with that, get in touch with me, I am a seasoned plug-in developer and I can certainly assist you with those efforts.

Favorite Feature

I don’t have a favorite new feature, but I have two favorite updated features:

Number one is what Adobe has done with Portfolios. In my opinion, Portfolios were one of the most underused features in Acrobat 9, and I hope that the updates to the Portfolio system will help to give that feature the necessary exposure so that we see more and more of these compound documents.

My number two updated feature is the much improved export function to other file formats. Whenever I had to create a MS Word document out of a PDF file in the past, it was always a hit-or-miss job – some documents worked reasonably well, others didn’t work at all. But regardless of how well it worked, there was always some editing necessary after the export to make the Word file look like the original PDF document. With the new export in Acrobat X, I get Word documents that look exactly like the PDF file. Great job, Adobe!

I’ve written about VBA and Acrobat JavaScript before, and I’ve also mentioned that you can combine VBA and JavaScript to access PDF form fields, but I still owe a sample for that. I had to answer another question today about how to exactly do that, so I whipped up a quick sample program that demonstrates the use of the JavaScript Object (JSO) to read and write AcroForm fields.

We start the same way as in my old VBA sample to create a VBA program that references the Acrobat TLB and to add a button to a document. When we now use the following script as the button handler, we can work with form fields:

Private Sub CommandButton1_Click()
    Dim AcroApp As Acrobat.CAcroApp
    Dim theForm As Acrobat.CAcroPDDoc
    Dim jso As Object
    Dim text1, text2 As String
    
    Set AcroApp = CreateObject("AcroExch.App")
    Set theForm = CreateObject("AcroExch.PDDoc")
    theForm.Open ("C:\temp\sampleForm.pdf")
    Set jso = theForm.GetJSObject
    
    ' get the information from the form fields Text1 and Text2
    text1 = jso.getField("Text1").Value
    text2 = jso.getField("Text2").Value
    
    MsgBox "Values read from PDF: " & text1 & " " & text2

    ' set a text field
    Dim field2 As Object
    Set field2 = jso.getField("Text2")
    
    field2.Value = 13   ' assign the number 13 to the fields value
    
    ' get the information from the form fields Text1 and Text2
    text1 = jso.getField("Text1").Value
    text2 = jso.getField("Text2").Value
    
    MsgBox "Values read from PDF: " & text1 & " " & text2

    theForm.Close
     
    AcroApp.Exit
    Set AcroApp = Nothing
    Set theForm = Nothing
     
    MsgBox "Done"
End Sub

This program requires a PDF file with text fields called “Text1″ and “Text2″ to be stored as C:\temp\sampleForm.pdf. With the explanation in the previous two blog posts, it should not be hard to understand what’s going on here. The only new command introduced is the getField() function, which returns a form field. The form field object has a property “value” which contains the actual value that’s assigned to the field. Give it a try and let me know how it works for you. The updated form field is not saved (because the document does not get saved) – I’ll leave that up to the reader to figure out.

Also, this program will not work with XFA forms (the ones you create in Designer). For those, you need to use the XFA DOM to access the form data. For anybody interested in XFA forms, the LifeCycle Designer ES Scripting Reference is a must read.

Every now and then I come across the question “What is the best way to learn scripting for Adobe Acrobat? Are there any books or other resources averrable?”. After doing some research, I think I finally found the best resource for beginners and for seasoned Acrobat JavaScript programmers that need a quick tip or a recipe to copy&paste into a project:

PDFScripting.com

The site offers content for both paying members and the general public. If you are new to scripting, and you don’t want to spend the money for a membership (yet), take a look at the free content at http://www.pdfscripting.com/public/department40.cfm – it walks you through creating your first AcroForm script, but also offers a number of videos that explain more complicated concepts. For the really good stuff however, you have to pay.

Ever wondered how to hook up a PDF form with an Excel spread sheet? Wonder no more! The article series “Acrobat, PDF and Excel Spreadsheets” teaches you more than you ever wanted to know about that subject.

You may remember my post about dynamic stamps in Acrobat. The PDFScripting.com site has a lot more information about dynamic forms and provides a number of very interesting samples (video link).

There is a ton more information available for both AcroForm and LiveCycle Designer scripting. This information comes in form of articles, videos, a copy&paste script library and downloadable sample files that illustrate a subject.

To get familiar with the web site, Thom Parker has recorded a video tour that helps to navigate the site, but also gives a pretty good overview about what’s available both for free and for paying members at “Take a tour of the PDFScripting.com website!” (video link).

So, no need to ask me for a good Acrobat scripting resource anymore, just go to PDFScripting.com and sign up for a year – it’s well worth the membership fee (and as Thom says in his tour video, no surprise at the end of the year, the membership does not automatically renew).

For a few years now Adobe has been telling 3rd party developers that the ADM (Adobe Dialog Manager) will be discontinued, and that existing plug-ins may have to be ported to something else. If I remember correctly, this started with Acrobat 7 or 8, but back then it was a soft threat – everything still worked, and there wasn’t much incentive to start porting plug-ins. However, with the release of the Acrobat 9 SDK the ADM related header files were gone, but ADM based plug-ins were still working (at least some of them).

The removal of the header files does send a strong signal, but what was an even stronger signal for me was that one of the ADM based plug-in I was working on was no longer working correctly on some versions of Windows.

As far as Adobe is concerned, ADM is no longer supported – that means there won’t be any bug fixes for it, but the plug-in has to work with Acrobat 9 on any Windows system that’s supported by Acrobat 9. So, what is a developer to do in such a situation?

Adobe does not give us much guidance in what to chose as a replacement for ADM. The most obvious choice is to stick with the native UI framework that comes with the operating system, but the advantage of ADM was that one could write UI code that would run in both Windows and Mac plug-ins. One of the sample plug-ins – wxPlugin – that comes with the Acrobat SDK is based on wxWidgets. To me that was a pretty strong hint that wxWidgets would be a good choice…

However, even though the Mac version of the SDK does come with the wxPlugin code and even contains a XCode project file, it does not compile. After some work, trying to come up with a combination of wxWidget configuration options and wxPlugin project settings, I was able to create an Acrobat plug-in that worked.

In order to “fix” the Mac’s version of the wxPlugin I first had to compile wxWidgets. Use the following configure command line to create the static wxWidget libraries that can be linked with the project:

configure CC=gcc-4.0 CXX=g++-4.0 LD=g++-4.0 --enable-universal_binary \
--disable-shared --with-macosx-sdk=/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk \
--with-mmacosx-version-min=10.4 --enable-debug

Just install the libraries and include files according to the instructions provided by Adobe.

A closer inspection of the plug-in code then revealed that the part that actually did anything was commented out for the Mac with #ifndef MAC_PLATFORM statements, so I removed those and the last thing to do was to remove the reference to the libexpat library – it is provided by the operating system and does not have to be provided by wxWidgets.

With a working environment on the Mac, wxWidgets is a viable alternative for ADM for either new Acrobat plug-ins, or existing plug-ins that need to be modified to make them compatible with the current version of Acrobat.

If your Acrobat plug-ins are still using ADM, now would be a good time to think about what to do about that… If you need any help, let me know.

Acrobat’s JavaScript is a great tool to extend the application, or to automate reoccurring tasks. There are several ways a JavaScript can be added to the application or a document (e.g. folder level scripts, validation scripts, event handling scripts, …), but regardless of how a script is written, chances are that the developer wants to test parts of the script in Acrobat’s Javascript console. This console window can be shown by either using the “Advanced>Document Processing>JavaScript Debugger…” menu item or Ctrl-J on Windows or Cmd-J on a Mac:

After the console or debugger window comes up, the user can then enter Javascript and execute it…

… that is, as long as a full keyboard with a numeric keypad is used. In Adobe’s documentation, we find the following instructions to execute Javascript typed into the console window:

The JavaScript console allows you to evaluate single or multiple lines of code. There are three ways to evaluate JavaScript code while using the interactive console:

• To evaluate a portion of a line of code, highlight the portion and press either the Enter key on the numeric keypad or press Ctrl + Enter.
• To evaluate a single line of code, make sure the cursor is positioned on that line and press either the Enter key on the numeric keypad or press Ctrl + Enter.
• To evaluate multiple lines of code, highlight those lines and press either the Enter key on the numeric keypad or press Ctrl + Enter.

That works fine as long as you have access to the numeric keypad, but on a MacBook or a MacBook Pro without that keypad. No key combination involving fn, ctrl, cmd or option with the Return or Enter key will result in the Javascript getting executed.

The virtual keyboard to the rescue: Mac OS comes with a handy keyboard viewer that allows us to send the correct key code to the application. To bring up the keyboard viewer, bring up the Mac OS System Preferences first and select the “Keyboard” category:

Make sure that the option “Show Keyboard & Character Viewer in menu bar” is selected. Once this is done, you can access the keyboard viewer from the menu bar:

Now comes the tricky part: Write some Javascript in the console window and place the cursor on the line you want to execute or select the snippet of the Javascript that should be executed. In the following example I’m using code from Adobe’s Javascript API documentation:

  var menuItems = app.listMenuItems()
  for( var i in menuItems)
    console.println(menuItems[i] + "\n")

With the console prepped, bring up the keyboard viewer and start pushing keys – real keys that is: Hold down the “fn” and the “control” key, then move the mouse pointer to the “Enter” key on the keyboard viewer and click it…

… and voila, the script gets executed:

This is not the most straight forward method, but at least it’s possible to use the Javascript console to execute code when using a MacBook.

Nuance (the people behind OmniPage and Dragon Naturally Speaking and a bunch of other things) release a competitor to the free Adobe Reader – the free Nuance PDF Reader (http://www.nuance.com/imaging/products/pdf-reader.asp). The feature list looks very promising:

• Fill and save PDF forms
• Annotate PDFs
• Convert PDF files to Word Excel or RTF
• Can disable JavaScript
• 100% compatibility with Adobe Acrobat (we have to wait to see how compatible it really is)
• Supports PDF Portfolios

Now to the things that it does not do:

• No support for Mac OS X or Linux
• No participation in online document reviews

I’ve not spent enough time with it yet to offer a detailed review, but it’s certainly a good alternative to the Adobe Reader. Competition is a good thing, maybe Adobe will take a few cues from Nuance for their next release of Reader.

Have you ever tried to fill a PDF form in Adobe Reader and to then save that filed document to your hard disk? Did it work? Chances are that it did not.

Have you ever thought about why the Adobe Reader is called “Reader”? The answer is pretty obvious, it’s because it is only reading and displaying (and printing) PDF files – that is, it is not writing them. That also includes that it will not save a modified document. You would need the “Adobe Writer” – or “Adobe Acrobat” as it is called for that.

But regardless of the name, we can “trick” the Reader into writing a filled form to the disk. OK, it’s not really a trick, Adobe did implement this feature, so it’s official, and we are not hacking or cracking anything.

Adobe has a server based solution that does allow you to create PDF files that are “reader enabled”: Adobe LiveCycle Reader Extensions ES
That technology allows you to “Fill in, sign, comment on, or save Adobe PDF files using only Adobe Reader”. Sounds like the perfect solution. Let me tell you a little secret: Whenever you hear the terms “Adobe” and “Server” in the same sentence, it usually means expensive…

Here is another secret – not really, it’s documented in a lot of places, but Acrobat users often don’t know about it: You can use Adobe Acrobat to “reader enable” PDF files as well. However, when you agreed to the EULA during the installation of Acrobat, you also agreed to using this technology only for a form with a maximum of 500 copies. The reason for that is of course, that Adobe still wants to sell the server based solution for document workflows that involve more copies.

So, let’s take a look at the EULA and find out exactly what we agreed to:

“15.12.3 For any unique Extended Document, you may only either (a) Deploy such Extended Document to an unlimited number of unique recipients but shall not extract information from more than five hundred (500) unique instances of such Extended Document or any hardcopy representation of such Extended Document containing filled form fields; or (b) Deploy such Extended Document to no more than five hundred (500) unique recipients without limits on the number of times you may extract information from such Extended Document returned to you filled-in by such Recipients. Notwithstanding anything herein to the contrary, obtaining additional licenses to use Acrobat Pro or Acrobat Pro Extended shall not increase the foregoing limits (that is, the foregoing limits are the aggregate total limits regardless of how many additional licenses to use Acrobat Pro or Acrobat Pro Extended you may have obtained). “

You may want to review that with your lawyer, I’m just an engineer, and in no position to give legal advice. I’ll however let you know what my interpretation of that section is: We have two options, we can either distribute our enabled form to an unlimited number of users, but we can only process a maximum of 500 unique responses. So, if we distribute our form to 1000 recipients, and we get 500 copies back, we are good. If we receive 501 replies, we can process the first 500, but the last one we cannot even look at. It also does not matter if we receive the filled out forms via a printed sheet of paper, or electronically. The second option is a bit more complicated, and you really should talk to your lawyer about that. To me it seems that you can distribute 500 copies of your form to 500 unique recipients, and they can then submit that form as often as they want. This could e.g. be a form that needs to be submitted once a week. Every one of your (up to 500) users/customers/clients has a copy of that form, and then once a week they fill in new data and submit the form.

Now we know what we can do with these forms, but we still don’t know how to use Acrobat for that. Let me show you a few screen shots.

Let’s assume you have a PDF form that you want to distribute, open that file in Acrobat and select “Forms>Distribute Form”:

This will bring up the dialog that we need to work with for the next few steps:

As you can see, I’ve selected to manually collect the responses in my email. That’s the most straight forward option and does not require any other configuration. The information presented below the selection does give you a pretty good idea about what it is. For now, let’s stick with the email option, but please, play around with the other options and let me know if you run into problems.

In the next step we specify the target location on our local hard disk for the protected (and now reader-enabled) copy of our file:

Now we need to add some information about us, the author:

We get one more chance to revise our decision about the delivery method, so if you want to take a different approach, and use Acrobat.com to collect the returned forms, here is your last chance. I will stick with the email option:

Once we click on the “Finish” button, the form will be prepared and saved, and Acrobat will display the Tracker interface. That dialog can also be opened via the “Forms>Track Forms” menu item (see the menu screen shot from above). I will talk more about that in a future post.

All you have to do now is to distribute your form. In a future post I will talk about how to process the returned data.

If allowing your users to locally save a form, you are done. They now can partially fill a form, save it, open it at a later time and continue with the form.

A while ago I tried to create an interactive dynamic stamp in Acrobat. These are dynamic stamps (like for example a stamp that automatically puts the current date into a field that is part of the stamp), but with a UI component that pops up and queries the user for some information that also gets embedded as part of the stamp (e.g. a phone number or a name).

I was not very successful. I could not figure out how to make sure that the UI only gets triggered when the stamp gets applied, and not when the stamp file gets loaded by Acrobat.

Then I came across an article by Rick Borstein titled “Add Dynamic Exhibit Stamps in Acrobat using a free stamp set” on the Acrobat for Legal Professionals blog. It had all the parts that are required, it even came with a couple of sample stamps. It also gave credit to the original source for that information: Acrobat JavaScript Guru Thom Parker

Thom provides all the theory behind why this works – very interesting to read if you are into that kind of stuff. It’s however not required to understand all that if you just want to use these stamps. You can just download Rick’s sample files and modify them until they fit your needs.

However if you want a dynamic stamp that shows more than just one line of interactively provided information, the examples do not work. They only provide one one-line input field and then put that one line on the PDF document. I wanted a stamp that could actually take several lines of user input and use that in a stamp. I had some work to do…

Acrobat’s JavaScript does allow to create custom user interfaces by creating a data structure and then calling executeDialog() with that data as parameter. Instead of a simple call to app.response() like in Thom’s and Rick’s examples, I needed to create a more complicated UI structure and embed that in the examples.

Here is the original code from the example:

var cAsk = "Enter Exhibit Number" ;
var cTitle = "Exhibit Number:  ";
if(event.source.forReal && (event.source.stampName == "#UdzyXagRctZoS5p43TZ43C"))
{
  var cMsg = app.response(cAsk, cTitle);
  event.value = cMsg;
  event.source.source.info.exhibit = cMsg;
}

var dialog = {
  retString: "",

  commit:function (dialog) { // called when OK pressed
    var results = dialog.store();
    this.retString = results["stxt"];
  },

  description:
  {
    name: "Stamp Information",    // Dialog box title
    elements:
    [
      {
        type: "view",
        elements:
        [
          {
            name: "Enter Multi-line Information: ",
            type: "static_text",
          },
          {
            item_id: "stxt",
            type: "edit_text",
            multiline: true,
            width: 300,
            height: 80
          },
          {
            type: "ok_cancel",
            ok_name: "Ok",
            cancel_name: "Cancel"
          },
        ]
      },
    ]
  }
}; 

if(event.source.forReal && (event.source.stampName == "#UdzyXagRctZoS5p43TZ43C"))
{
  if ("ok" == app.execDialog(dialog))
  {
    var cMsg = dialog.retString;
    event.value = cMsg;
    event.source.source.info.exhibit = cMsg;
  }
}

1. Open the “Exhibit+Stamp.pdf” document in Adobe Acrobat Pro
2. Go to the second page in this document – that’s the first stamp
3. Select the TouchUp Object Tool (e.g. via Tools>Advanced Editing>TouchUp Object Tool)
4. Right-click on the lower part of the stamp (where the UserData1 field) and select Properties… from the menu
5. Select the Options tab and check the “Multi-line” checkbox
6. Select the Calculate tab and click on the Edit button next to the custom calculation script and replace the old script with the one from above
7. Save the script with the OK button, then close the properties dialog

That’s it – just install the stamp file as described in Rick’s document. Done.

Of will of course be hard to see two or more lines in the relatively small stamp, so you may have to change the layout of the stamp to actually make use of the additional lines.f

If you’ve seen my resume – or talked to me lately, you know that I create Acrobat plug-ins for a living. When people hear that, they usually think something like “Don’t forget to pick up the dry cleaning” or “I need to bring my cat to the vet for the rabies shot”… Yes, I understand, this may not be the most exciting topic, but probably only because you don’t know enough about what these “plug-ins” are, so let me explain.

 

Adobe Acrobat is a very powerful tool, more powerful that most users actually realize. I wont go into any details about how powerful exactly – at least not today. Lets just say that it has something for everybody. However, you may need something in addition to what Adobe provides, something that still is in the general area of PDF. Adobe may not have considered your needs because either the target market for “your” feature is too small, or to far out there… Or you are so far ahead of everybody else that they have not even thought about that feature yet.

Adobe did however do a very interesting thing: They created an interface that allows 3rd party developers to create solutions based on Adobe Acrobat – using plug-ins. It is a very powerful interface, and hence not something that you can pick up in an afternoon. There are several thousand pages of API documentation that one needs to understand before a plug-in should be written.

A plug-in is – from a technical point of view – a module or library that gets loaded dynamically at runtime. Acrobat will scan it’s plug-ins directory and will load any modules it finds. Once loaded, such a plug-in can extend Acrobat by e.g. adding menu items, toolbuttons, or event handlers (e.g. a function that gets executed whenever a documents gets loaded).

 

Interestingly enough, the plug-ins directory of a fresh Adobe Acrobat installation is not empty… A lot of Acrobat’s functionality is actually implemented as plug-ins. You can verify that on a Windows system by temporarily disabling all plug-ins by holding down the Shift key when bringing up Acrobat. That will load the application without any plug-ins. When you compare the toolbar or the menu bar with a fully loaded application, you’ll see what portion of the Acrobat core functionality is actually implemented in plug-ins.

The plug-in interface has different abstraction levels (COS, PDE, AV, …). If there is enough interest, I will provide information about how to navigate that API, and how to structure a plug-in.

The Acrobat SDK is available for free from Adobe’s Acrobat Development Center.

Here are a few examples of commercially available plug-ins that I’ve used:

• Enfocus PitStop Professional:
  This is a preflight tool.
• Quite Imposing Plus:
  The best PDF based imposition tool that I am aware of.
• Enfocus Browser:
  Allows to review and change the internal structure of a PDF file.

No, this is not about my patent pending idea of a sheet splitter that turns duplex documents into simplex documents… This post is about a problem that comes up every now and then: When you scan a book or a magazine, chances are that you end up with two physical pages on your scanned image, and your document looks something like this:

Pages one and two are on the same scan, three and four are, and five and six and so on.

How can we split such a combined page into it’s two parts?

There are of course different solutions to this problem, some more complicated than others, some producing better results than others.

The most straight forward approach would be to write an Acrobat plug-in or a standalone application (e.g. using the iText library) that takes the source page, determines what needs to be copied to the new page that should represent the left half of the original page, and then just copy those page elements. With a scanned source document, this would potentially mean that the scanned image needs to be cropped and placed on the target page. Sounds complicated, and it is complicated. Is there an easier way to accomplish the same results?

[More after the jump]

If we have access the Acrobat, we can use JavaScript to mimic the behavior of the just described application. With Acrobat’s JavaScript, we do of course not have access to the page content elements, so we need to find a different way to end up with the same results.

JavaScript gives us access to the crop box of a PDF page (if you don’t know what that is, read up on page boxes in the PDF Reference), this means we can find out how big a page is, but also set the crop box to configure which part of the page should be displayed in the viewer, or should get printed.

So, if our combined page is 11×17″, and we want to extract two 8 1/2×11″ pages, we first need to “select” the left half of the page, and then the right half of the same page.

Here is the script that will do just that:
SplitPages.js

Copy that file to the Acrobat JavaScript directory – for Acrobat 9 on a Windows machine that would be

c:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 9.0\Acrobat\JavaScript

ProcessDocument = app.trustedFunction(function()
{
// create a new document
app.beginPriv();
var newDoc = app.newDoc();
app.endPriv();

var i = 0;
while (i < this.numPages)
{
  newDoc.insertPages( {
  nPage: newDoc.numPages-1,
  cPath: this.path,
  nStart: i
});
newDoc.insertPages( {
  nPage: newDoc.numPages-1,
  cPath: this.path,
  nStart: i
});
// we did this twice so that we can then split each copy of the page into a left
// and right half.
i++;
}

In these few lines we copy every page from the source document (this.path, which is the path to the active document) to our newly created document – and we are doing that twice. This is necessary because we need to crop out the left half of the page for the first page, and the right half of the page for the second page. After this loop, we will have twice as many pages in our new document than we have in our source document.

if (newDoc.numPages > 1)
{
  newDoc.deletePages(0);  // this gets rid of the page that was created with the newDoc call.
}

Now that we have all the pages in our new document, we no longer need the blank page we got when we created the document. So, we delete it.

// at this point we have a documnent with every page from the source document
// copied twice

 for (i=0; i<newDoc.numPages; i++)
{
  // determine the crop box of the page
  var cropRect = newDoc.getPageBox("Crop", i);
  var halfWidth = (cropRect[2]-cropRect[0])/2;

var cropLeft = new Array();
cropLeft[0] = cropRect[0];
cropLeft[1] = cropRect[1];
cropLeft[2] = cropRect[0] + halfWidth;
cropLeft[3] = cropRect[3];

The previous few lines create a new Array. A page box is represented as an array of four values. We can now assign the partially modified values to the new page box. As you can see, three of the four values just are copies of the original crop box. Array element 2 however gets modified. It is the original X value for the lower left point of the crop box, and we add half of our page width to that number. This means, the new right edge of the modified page box is now at the halfway point between the two sides.

var cropRight = new Array();
cropRight[0] = cropRect[2] - halfWidth;
cropRight[1] = cropRect[1];
cropRight[2] = cropRect[2];
cropRight[3] = cropRect[3];

if (i%2 == 0)
{
  newDoc.setPageBoxes( {
  cBox: "Crop",
  nStart: i,
  rBox: cropLeft
});
}
else
{
  newDoc.setPageBoxes( {
  cBox: "Crop",
  nStart: i,
  rBox: cropRight
});
}
}
}
)

This is a bit tricky… Acrobat starts to count pages with page 0. The first page in the document is on the left half of our first sheet. All of a sudden, our first page is actually an even page number (0), and not like in “normal” books an odd number (1). This means that for all even numbers we need to crop the left half, and for all odd numbers we need to crop the right half.

We test for “evenness” by performing the modulo operation on our page number. If the result is 0, we know we have an even number, so we can use the left side crop box. If the operation returns 1, we are dealing with an odd page number, and we will use the ride side crop box.

The new crop box gets applied with the doc.setPageBoxes() method.

// add the menu item
app.addMenuItem({
  cName: "splitPagesJS",     // this is the internal name used for this menu item
  cUser: "Split Pages",       // this is the label that is used to display the menu item
  cParent: "Document",              // this is the parent menu. The file menu would use "File"
  cExec: "ProcessDocument()",  // this is the JavaScript code to execute when this menu item is selected
  cEnable: "event.rc = (event.target != null);",       // when should this menu item be active?
  nPos: 0
});

Almost done… We’ve implemented the functionality to split the pages, now we just need a mechanism to actually start our little program. I’ve chosen to create a menu item under the “Document” menu. That menu item is only available (not grayed out), if we have an active document.

Disclaimer: Of course, there is no such thing as a sheet splitter, and therefore there is no patent application. It’s a joke.