Help - Simple navigation buttons bring up purple form bar!

Hi luckylou,

This exact situation (irritation) has come up before. Unfortunately for you, buttons on a PDF are form fields (elements) so you are pretty much stuck with the purple bar. You can set Acrobat or Adobe Reader not to show the purple bar in the Preferences but that is only for your own system. Anyone who views your form would also have to set their Preferences in order to not see it as well. Here is a thread where this was discussed in the past and the reason why Adobe chose to force this feature on authors/viewers-

http://www.acrobatusers.com/forums/aucbb/viewtopic.php?id=19672


Hope this helps,

Dimitri
WindJack Solutions
www.pdfscripting.com
www.windjack.com

Thanks for the response. I saw that thread earlier while researching an answer. I was hoping that my case of just having buttons and no form entry fields might be different, but it seems it's not.

I am amazed there's no way around this. Adobe tries to promote the flexibility of PDF as an interactive document but showing the purple form prompt bar when there is no need to enter data into form fields, much less no actual entry fields at all, is flabbergasting in its obstinance.

One weird thing: If we extract pages from the master document as individual files and open them we get no purple bar. It's probably because the pages to which they are linked aren't available and thus negate actual button functionality, but I'll see if this holds true, because apparently the purple bar doesn't show on extracted files with a nine page range in some cases and I know some of the linked pages would have to be in that file.

If we just had links and not buttons would that change anything? I don't see how we could create the pop-up index this way but I might be worth sacrificing if we can convert our buttons into links and lose the purple bar.

Hi luckylou,

Links should work as they are not form fields, and you can run JavaScript from links so you should be able to activate the popup menu from a link.

I'm not sure what is going on with the extracted pages. If the extracted pages have navigation buttons then I would assume the purple bar show up. Let us know what you discover.

Hope this helps,

Dimitri
WindJack Solutions
www.pdfscripting.com
www.windjack.com