PDF Hacks

Chapter 7. Scripting and Programming Acrobat

Introduction: Hacks #93-100

users think of Although most users think of Acrobat as a GUI interface to PDF documents, you can also automate and extend it. Some automation features are built into Acrobat, especially Acrobat 6 Professional, and you can create your own automated processing sequences using a variety of other tools.

Hack #93. Modify or Convert Batches of Documents

Automate repetitive tasks using Acrobat, such as converting folders of Word documents to PDF.

If you have a folder of PDFs that you must alter or convert, consider using Acrobat's built-in batch processing feature. After you create a batch sequence, you can use it to process large quantities of PDFs hands-free. You can also apply a batch sequence to a single PDF, which means you can create batch sequences for use as macros.

Acrobat batch processing isn't just for manipulating PDF. You can use it to convert Microsoft Office documents, PostScript files, or graphic bitmaps into PDF documents. Or, use batch processing to convert PDF documents to HTML, PostScript, RTF, text, or graphic bitmaps. Many of these options are not available in Acrobat 5. In Acrobat 6, you can also apply OCR to bitmaps or refry PDFs to prepare them for online distribution [Hack #60] .

You can automate many of the basic things you do in Acrobat with batch processing. We'll describe a couple of examples.

Refry a Folder Full of PDFs (Acrobat 6 Pro)

Before publishing a PDF online for wide distribution, ...