Change Login Name Via the Registry

The login name used by the Commenting tools is the system login name. If you want to change it, then create a new user on your system, and login to that name.

But I believe you are more interested in the Author name used on the comments? On the Preferences dialog, under comments, there is a setting for "Always use User Name for Author Name". The setting is a bit deceiving. If it is checked Acrobat actually uses the "Collab.user" property as the author. This property is defaulted to the user name. Normally it would only be explicitly set by joining a comment and review session (also called a Collaboration session). But you can change this setting yourself for any document open in Acrobat.

Run this code in the Console Window

Collab.user = "My Name";

This setting is only valid for the current document. You'll need to run the code each time you open a PDF you want the name to be different on.

This could be automated, depending on your workflow.

Hello thomp thanks for responding! Appreciate your help.

I'm searching for Collab.user as we speak. I'm actually interested in th 'Author' field for the document properties (CTRL +D). We generate a lot of PDFs and each time I'd like our team to speak with one voice using our company name in place of our unique windows logon. Otherwise someone has to be the final layer of checking to ensure the company name has been inserted (me!).

I went back and re-read your post. I think that the latter part only applies to adding comments.

The first suggestion was changing the username (windows user account) that I want to have appear in Acrobat. That's what I've found over the web but that won't work in my application. I've got to many people who would need that same logon.

As an aside, it's not feasible in a client / server architecture to change a domain logon to give everyone the same logon. In my case I would have to have several people using the same domain logons across the network. With the proliferation of thin clients plus roaming profiles that isn't a possiblity. Additionally creating a local machine account (aside from the local Administrator) is typically not done in a business environment and if you were to create a local account you would have to enter your credentials frequently when accessing domain shares. Whew, that was a workout :)

There has to be a registry key somewhere that points it to the windows logon.

Thanks much!

The document author is a different animal. Its part of the PDF metadata and is set, or not set, by the PDF creation tool. What kind of document is the original and how is it converted?

You can set the author from a script with:

this.author = "Me";

or

this.info.author = "Me";

In fact, I have a tool for this at www.pdfscripting.com

Ahh very cool, now we're talking. Almost exclusively the origin content is a doc / docx

The Acrobat converter for Word does not use the Acrobat Identity data to fill in the Author name. And as far as I can tell it doesn't use the login name either. Don't know where it's getting the author from. But I'm sure it's something on the system related to the login name. I also didn't find any conversion settings related to the author:(

But you can still change the author after the file has been converted either manually or with a script.

It is possible for PDF Maker to use the MS Office properties to populate the corresponding PDF properties. somve versions of MS Office and Acrobat will not work together until the user information is entered into MS OFfice.

Another technique would be to use a MS Word hidden print field to insert a PDF Mark statement that provides the author's name.

When I look in Edit->Preferences->Identify it has my 'Login Name: Swankee' grayed out which is what my domain login is. I'm sure that's where it's pulling it from is my logon credentials. Too bad it wasn't pulling it from word where I could just change my word username :(

Hello George, appreciate the help. I googled for PDF Mark statement but didn't find anything. Do you have a link on the topic? thanks!

You open MS Word, select "Adobe PDF" on Word's menu bar, select "Change Conversion Settings", select the "Settings" tab, check the "Convert Document Information" option and click "OK".

To change the author property in Word, select "File => Properties" on the "Summary" tab change the "Author" field and click "OK" button.To access the PDF Maker help file, "Adobe PDF => Change Conversion Settings", click on the "Help" button.View PDFMaker conversion settings

Great stuff George!! thanks!

Well guys, that was great support. I'm all set. Thanks so much!