Adobe Acrobat

Hi,

I've been asked to develop a VB program that will take a PDF file selected by the user, apply a watermark on-demand and them print it. Nothing too exotic.
Problem is the source PDFs are old and have some problems handling watermarks and they crash Acrobat. I found out that if I re-print them before applying the watermark using our current version of Acrobat (8) everything goes smoothly. My problem is, how can I automate the printing process to the PDF Printer in Windows. The name of the new PDF should be specified by a variable. I already got the watermark and printing to a physical printer part done. I'm just stuck on printing to the PDF printer in an automated fashion.
Any help you can provide will be greatly appreciated.

Best regards and thanks in advance

Hugo Sombreireiro

2008-01-15 13:47:46

thomp

Registered: Feb 15 2006

Posts: 4411

Your problem probably isn't that the PDFs are old, but that they were created with a non-Adobe application in the first place. Acrobat 8 has really tightened down what it will accept as real PDF, hence Acrobat's bad behavior, i.e., crashing.

If you have all the old PDFs in single location I would suggest using the PDF Optimizer in a batch process to convert them all. You can also use the PDF Printer in a batch process. This is sometimes called re-frying the PDF and it is not ecouraged. However, if you do use the PDF Printing you will have to babysit the process since each document will display a dialog.

Or, since from your post I assume that you are already using the IAC, you can print directly from a VB program. But again, you will have to babysit it.

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

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Automated printing