RE: Opening a PDF document from a program

["Peter Ring" <pri@xxxxxx>]

I investigated this some time ago. Here are the main points of what I came
up with and a link to further information [1]. You need to know a bit about
PDF to make any use of it ;)

If you can only assume the free Acrobat Reader is available, there are not
many ways to interact directly with the application. But, since there's a
JavaScript interpreter available in the Acrobat Reader, there are a number
of ways to work around this 'shortcoming'.

The main issue is how to signal something has happened to Acrobat Reader.
Opening a PDF can trigger an event that calls a Javascript function in the
PDF. This JavaScript function can do various useful things.

I did not check if doing something along these lines would be a break of
license condition for the free Acrobat Reader. The 'shortcoming' is
intentional, so just maybe you're not supposed to work around it. Also,
Acrobat Approval (cheaper scaled-down Acrobat) might have the full API (I
have not checked).

Kind regards,
Peter Ring

[1]
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF8&oe=UTF8&threadm=790034%241
ql4%241%40news-inn.inet.tele.dk&rnum=1&prev=/groups%3Fq%3Dacrobat%2Bjavascri
pt%2Bpeter%2Bring%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF8%26oe%3DUTF8%26selm%3D790034%
25241ql4%25241%2540news-inn.inet.tele.dk%26rnum%3D1

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-----Original Message-----
From: owner-framers@omsys.com [mailto:owner-framers@omsys.com]On Behalf
Of Thomas Michanek
Sent: 6. juni 2002 10:49
To: hedley_finger@myob.com.au; framers@omsys.com
Subject: Re: Opening a PDF document from a program


> A programmer just asked me if it was possible to request Acrobat to open a
> document at a particular page from an application.

I investigated something similar a while back, and the following is what
I found out, when it comes to making FM hypertext links to a PDF page.
However, things may have changed since then; I distinctly remember someone
saying that you could use OLE or something like that to overcome the
problems in Windows.

Another user has tried xpdf instead of Acrobat and reported:
> with xpdf-1.00 you can open a pdf file at a named destination with
> xpdf somefile.pdf +M8.newlink.destination

------------------------------------------------------------
There is no way to specify a location to open a PDF file on
by calling the Acrobat Reader application (acrord32.exe).


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