These forums are now Read Only. If you have an Acrobat question, ask questions and get help from one of our experts.

Modify Acrobat Reader 8 User Interface

mruberti
Registered: May 9 2007
Posts: 2

Hi,

i need to modify the Acrobat Reader 8 user interface. I would like to remove some voices like "check for updates" from Help Menu and other things.

How can i do it?

Thank's

Michele Ruberti

konsta
Registered: Jul 26 2006
Posts: 8
I believe you would do it with the hideMenuItem method of the app object. Since I have Acrobat Pro installed on my machines, I'm not sure this will work the same for a machine with only Reader on it, but a cursory check of the documentation seem to indicate it should work.

Since you don't have a JavaScript console in reader, you will have to do it through a folder level JavaScript. You would create a file with a js extension (e.g. hideMenu.js) and put it in the javascripts folder underneath the folder where Reader is installed. For Acrobat 8 Prof on a pc, the default is

C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 8.0\Acrobat\Javascripts

If you have access to the debugger console, you can get the folder path using

app.getPath("app", "javascript") ;

Creating the js file is very easy. Just open a simple text editor (NotePad on windows will work fine) and type the following lines in it:

app.hideMenuItem( cName1 ) ;
app.hideMenuItem( cName2 ) ;
etc.

where cName1, cName2, . . . are the menu name you want to remove. To get this list, get to a debugger console and type:

var objMenuItems = app.listMenuItems() ;
for( var objItem in objMenuItems ) {
console.println( objMenuItems[objItem] + "\n" )
}

There is code for a fancy printout of menuItems on page 126 of the most Nov 2006 version of the JavaScript for Acrobat API Reference.

One important thing to note, don't assume that the same menuItem in different versions of Acrobat have the same cName. If you are looking to hide menu items across your enterprise, you should double check to make sure that you are using the right cName for the installed version of Reader.

The only other potential problem is that I don't know if this will work on a Reader only environment, as I don't have one of those to test it out on (and I don't have the time to remove Acrobat Pro from my machine to test the theory). If you try the method I describe here, could you please post your results, so I can know if it works on Reader only installations?

---Andrew