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Acrobat 8 Standard, Web Viewer, and commenting

Bina
Registered: Jan 5 2009
Posts: 6
Answered

I have Acrobat 8 Standard on my PC. When I open a pdf from IE, I can see the pdf, but I can't use comments. If I try to add the commenting toolbar, it does not open. Comments work fine if I open Acrobat Standard directly. How can I make it work in the browser? We have a web application deployed to users that have Acrobat Standard installed on their PC's, and we want them to be able to edit the pdfs. The documents are stored in a shared location for editing.

Bina

My Product Information:
Acrobat Standard 8.0, Windows
thomp
Expert
Registered: Feb 15 2006
Posts: 4411
Unless specifically enabled, commenting is turned off for PDFs displayed in a browser. Place this line of code in a document level script for all the documents that you want to comment on the web. This should be part of your standard doc preparation for commenting.

Collab.showAnnotToolsWhenNoCollab = true;

BTW: this is a mostly undocumented JavaScript feature, which means that it may not be reliable in the future.

Thom Parker
The source for PDF Scripting Info
[url=http://www.pdfScripting.com]pdfscripting.com[/url]

The Acrobat JavaScript Reference, Use it Early and Often
[url=http://www.adobe.com/devnet/acrobat/javascript.php]http://www.adobe.com/devnet/acrobat/javascript.php[/url]

Thom Parker
The source for PDF Scripting Info
www.pdfscripting.com
Very Important - How to Debug Your Script

Bina
Registered: Jan 5 2009
Posts: 6
would that work for documents created with earlier versions of Acrobat?
thomp
Expert
Registered: Feb 15 2006
Posts: 4411
Since it's not really documented I'm not sure how far back it works, but I've tested it on Acrobat 8.

The version of the PDF itself is irrelevant. The only thing that's important is the version of Acrobat/Reader that's used to view it.

Thom Parker
The source for PDF Scripting Info
[url=http://www.pdfScripting.com]pdfscripting.com[/url]

The Acrobat JavaScript Reference, Use it Early and Often
[url=http://www.adobe.com/devnet/acrobat/javascript.php]http://www.adobe.com/devnet/acrobat/javascript.php[/url]

Thom Parker
The source for PDF Scripting Info
www.pdfscripting.com
Very Important - How to Debug Your Script

Bina
Registered: Jan 5 2009
Posts: 6
Is there a way to enable the typewriter tool as well?
thomp
Expert
Registered: Feb 15 2006
Posts: 4411
The typewriter is just a way of adding Free Text Annotations (basically another commenting tool) to the PDF. So it should work in a browser with the commenting tools enabled. But I don't know if it's been setup for this purpose. If the typewriter toolbar is not on the list then the only way to see if it really does work is to try and run the typewriter menu item from a button on the PDF.

Thom Parker
The source for PDF Scripting Info
[url=http://www.pdfScripting.com]pdfscripting.com[/url]

The Acrobat JavaScript Reference, Use it Early and Often
[url=http://www.adobe.com/devnet/acrobat/javascript.php]http://www.adobe.com/devnet/acrobat/javascript.php[/url]

Thom Parker
The source for PDF Scripting Info
www.pdfscripting.com
Very Important - How to Debug Your Script