command line parameters for Silent Printing in Acrobat professional

Unfortunately you've run into some security changes made to Acrobat 8. The command line (unsupported) parameters no longer work in the same fashion as previous versions.

Have you investigated using the PrintParam object in Javascript to accomplish silent printing? You can do this from a console, batch process, or application-level script. Check out [url=http://www.adobe.com/devnet/acrobat/pdfs/js_api_reference.pdf]Javascript for Acrobat API Reference[/url] for specific details.

Hey all, first post on this board. I'm a Software Engineer developing an application that batch prints PDF documents. I too would like to use either Acrobat Reader or the full version to silent print via command line parameters.

I am fairly new to using Acrobat from a development standpoint, and have some questions regarding this topic:

1) How can I use Acrobat's Javascript to perform a silent print from an external program? Specifically, I would like to keep the Acrobat window from popping up when requesting a print from an app I'm developing (ideally, I would love to hide the window altogether). From my initial reading on this, it doesn't seem this would be possible, as it appears Acrobat's Javascript is internal to the app itself, and cannot be referenced externally.

2) Can you explain the security issue that caused the removal of command line silent printing starting with Acrobat 8? Also, why are command line options unsupported? It seems to me such things would be highly useful for developers, especially for this particular topic.

Thank you,
Kurt

Acrobat and Reader can be controlled through an external program with the Acrobat IAC (Interapplication Communication Interface). Usually this is done from a VB (Windows) or AppleScript (MAC) program. There are commands for silent printing.

JavaScript is a different story. It is heavily sandboxed for security reasons. It's very important that any script that does something risky is not executed from inside a PDF. This includes silent printing. Don't want things to happen that the user has not explicitly authorized. But you can in fact do silent printing from Acrobat JavaScript, using a trusted folder level script. This is a script that is on the users system, not in a PDF. So it has some special privileges.

You can access the Acrobat JavaScript environment from the IAC using the JSO, or JavaScript Object. You'll find all this in the documentation.

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/acrobat/

I recently did a session on automating Acrobat at the PDF Central conference. You'll find my presentation, including live examples at:

http://www.pdfcentralconference.com/pdfcentralconference/descriptions.php

I don't know exactly why Adobe removed the command line option for print, but I do know that over the past couple of years that they have gotten paranoid about security, for obvious reasons. I suspect that it could be possible to print a PDF from an URL without the users knowledge. This is reason enough to get rid of it, and lots of other very useful features that have similar security risks.

Thom Parker
The source for PDF Scripting Info
[url=http://www.pdfScripting.com]pdfscripting.com[/url]

The Acrobat JavaScript Reference, Use it Early and Often
[url=http://www.adobe.com/devnet/acrobat/]http://www.adobe.com/devnet/acrobat/[/url]

Thom Parker, you mentioned the possibility of printing a PDF from a URL. I am trying to create a batch process to do just that, however, I cannot get Adobe Reader to open the file from the command line. It will open if I use the Open dialog, but that won't work as I need to do this in a batch process.

Can you offer any help?

What do you mean by a Batch Process?

Have you looked at the IAC documentation?

Adobe also has a document that explains the comman line parameters, called "Open Parameters". You can download it from the DevNet site linked above.

Thom Parker
The source for PDF Scripting Info
[url=http://www.pdfScripting.com]pdfscripting.com[/url]

The Acrobat JavaScript Reference, Use it Early and Often
[url=http://www.adobe.com/devnet/acrobat/javascript.php]http://www.adobe.com/devnet/acrobat/javascript.php[/url]

Then most important JavaScript Development tool in Acrobat
[url=http://www.pdfscripting.com/public/34.cfm#JSIntro][b]The Console Window (Video tutorial)[/b][/url]
[url=http://www.acrobatusers.com/tutorials/2006/javascript_console][b]The Console Window(article)[/b][/url]