Ted Padova’s AUC Blog

I decided to digest the recent announcement regarding the PDF specification moving to an ISO standard for a bit of time before adding yet another blog post on the subject.

As you can see in other posts by Carl Young, Leonard Rosenthol and Thom Parker right here on Acrobat Users, there won’t be any changes to the way you work with PDF documents and how your files are viewed and used by others. For all of us users, we won’t see much difference in creating and deploying our documents and we won’t loose any fuctionality with Acrobat and how Acrobat and Adobe Reader handle PDFs.

So the question no doubt pops up in peoples minds as to why the PDF specification is moving to the ISO (International Standards Organization) committee? The obvious reason and the operative here is International .

PDF is a standard in so many industries now and within many international organizations. This standardization has been driven by users worldwide working in a number of different industries. Among some of the most frequent users of Acrobat and PDF are international governments.

Entities as sensitive as governments need to have some form of assurance. They need assurance that the the results of the work being performed today won’t vanish tomorrow. They need to be assured that documents created today won’t need to be recreated in a few years to support a new technology. With an industry as fast paced as hi-tech, people want to be confident that new technologies won’t replace old methods.

To provide this assurance with the PDF specification, Adobe has submitted the spec to an international body to approve and provide input on the current and future characteristics of the PDF format. When the ISO committee sanctions the PDF specification, any user in any industry in any country in the world can be confident that a formal regulated standard has been adopted and approved by a collective group and not by a single developer.

Hence, the motive is primarily vested in providing users worldwide a degree of confidence that the time and energy you spend on document creation and distribution will be globally accepted.

Assuming the ISO committee approves the spcification and it does indeed become an ISO standard, the concern for users then becomes creating documents that meet the standards. Adobe will surley advance Acrobat development to insure that future releases of Acrobat are capable of producing ISO PDFs. What to watch out for are clone applications that create PDFs that don’t meet the standards. If you’re working with international organizations that demand ISO standard PDFs, be certain the tool you use for PDF creation are producing the PDFs accepted by the ISO.

ted

Worried about your PDF recipients using the proper version of an Acrobat viewer? If you use some of the new features in Acrobat such as creating PDF Packages, enabling PDF forms, etc., you’ll want to make sure that anyone viewing your PDF or filling out a form uses Adobe Reader or Acrobat version 7 or above.

To give a heads up warning to your PDF recipients, create an application alert dialog box that opens when a user opens your file in a version that won’t support some of the document features. Here’s how to do it:

Open a PDF document and select Advanced > Document Processing > Document JavaScripts . The JavaScript Functions diaog box opens. Add a script name such as viewerVersion and click the Add button and the JavaScript Editor opens.

Delete the default text in the JavaScript Editor and type the following code:

if (app.viewerVersion <7.0)
{
var msg = "An Acrobat viewer version 7.0 or above is required to fill in this form."
app.alert (msg);
}

Note that you can change the text within the quote marks to any text you want to appear in the alert dialog box.

Click OK in the JavaScript Editor and click Close in the JavaScript Functions dialog box and save the file with your new edits.

Each time a user opens your file in an Acrobat viewer less than version 7.0 an alert dialog box opens displaying the message you typed within the quote marks. If users open your document in a version 7.0 or greater the dialog box won’t open.

Make a habit of alerting your PDF recipients before they start working on a file.

You may have seen some tips on using the Distribute Form feature in Acrobat 8 or played around with it. Once the form is distributed you can easily combine data and export to a spreadsheet.

You may have another need for exporting form data from PDF forms that were created in earlier versions of Acrobat where you didn’t have the Distrubute Form feature available. Can you assemble this data and export to an Excel worksheet. The answer is YES, and it’s quite simple in Acrobat 8.

Just open the Forms menu and select Manage Form Data. From the submenu select Merge Data Files into Spreadsheet . A dialog opens and prompts you to add the forms you want to merge. Select the forms and click Export and a dialog opens permitting you to export the form data to a .csv file you can open in Microsoft Excel.