Adobe® Acrobat® 8 PDF Bible

Chapter 36. Understanding JavaScript

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Getting familiar with JavaScript

• Assessing Acrobat viewers and versions

• Creating calculations with JavaScript

• Adding JavaScripts to document actions

• Spawning pages from templates

• Working with pop-up menus

• Understanding JavaScript and Trusted Functions

• Automating JavaScript creation

With JavaScript you can create dynamic documents for not only forms, but also many other uses such as adding interactivity to files, and viewing options, animation, and similar features not available with Acrobat tools. JavaScript helps you add flare and pizzazz to your PDF files. In Acrobat Standard, you can edit JavaScripts and create JavaScripts using Bookmarks, links, and page actions. However, to get the full range of editing JavaScripts and applying JavaScripts to form fields, you need to use Acrobat Professional.

As with the disclaimer I added in the introduction of this book and in Chapter 33 as it applies to Adobe LiveCycle Designer, this book is also not about JavaScript. It would take another book the size of Acrobat 8 PDF Bible to provide complete coverage for all the JavaScript options you have in Acrobat. All I can hope to do in this chapter is provide a starting point in using JavaScript in Acrobat 8 and point you to sources where you can learn more.

For more sophisticated uses and some sound reasoning for coding forms, look at the Acrobat JavaScript Scripting Reference and the Acrobat JavaScript Scripting Guide. Both documents are available from ...