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Tweaking the Acrobat "Loop Up" function.

AndrewAlb
Registered: Aug 16 2007
Posts: 97

Is there anyway to tweak Acrobat's built in lookup function. I just discovered this today that if a right click on a word in my pdf acrobat gives me an option to 'look up' the word on dictionary.com. I was hoping I might be able to redirect the url to my companies website where the user could find definitions for complicated financial terms. Any thoughts on tweaking this or building a custom one?

Andrew D. Albrecht, MS
Solutions Developer
ING USFS

My Product Information:
Acrobat Pro 8.0999999999999996447286321199499070644378662109375, Windows
thomp
Expert
Registered: Feb 15 2006
Posts: 4411
"Dictionary.com" appears to be hard coded. I wasn't able to find anywhere it could be set, or any documentation on it. I also searched the registry to see if it was one of the many undocumented entries, and came up blank.

Look like it is what it is and nothing more.

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

AndrewAlb
Registered: Aug 16 2007
Posts: 97
oh well - thanks for looking into it.
Do you think that there might be a way to duplicate the functionality with a custom function?

Andrew D. Albrecht, MS
Solutions Developer
ING USFS

MrRamrod
Registered: Apr 20 2009
Posts: 12
continuing on this theme, this is related to a question i posed yesterday about modifying the UI.

The right-mouse context menu includes this "look up " option which
a) goes to a fixed reference url (dictionary.com) and
b) seems to be selective about what text it includes

i can see why b) makes sense when you (say) hover them mouse over something like a part number on a drawing - its very unlikely this part number would be referenced at dictionary.com, but my application (which embeds acrobat) DOES have information about part numbers etc., so I would like to be able to modify how the "look up" tool works.

it would be fantastic if that (via API) i could reference a callback method against the lookup which the context menu processor calls - my callback gets the reference string and I get to decide
a) should the string be included in the menu (if my app understands part numbers, i could agree to show "lookup A-10029-BERD" or whatever
b) i get to choose HOW the lookup is performed - perhaps via another callback which is passed the string when the user clicks on the menu item - i could then choose to process that lookup request differently to acrobat's default i.e. i would look it up locally, not go to dictionary.com

Having scoured the various API docs, I cant see a way of doing this, but maybe I missed something. Anyone know if this is actually possible (the last post for this thread in was 2007, so i dont know if Adobe have addressed this since?).

Otherwise, is there an established method of proposing 'enhancement requests' to the acrobat team?

cheers
-r
try67
Expert
Registered: Oct 30 2008
Posts: 2398
As to your last question, you can request a feature here:
http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=wishform

- AcrobatUsers Community Expert - Contact me personally at try6767 [at] gmail [dot] com
Check out my custom-made scripts website: http://try67.blogspot.com

MrRamrod
Registered: Apr 20 2009
Posts: 12
fantastic.
thanks for the pointer :)