This Acrobat plug-in embeds AppleScript commands into a PDF file. Well, actually ANY strings you type into the dialog box; but if you want it to be compiled and run, it should be correctly formatted AppleScript.
Why did I do this?
I worked for Adobe in the Acrobat team for almost three years. While I got to know the Mac version of Acrobat somewhat well (when I wasn't suffering through building the Nth+1 version of the installer), I never did get to learn PDF.
Acrobat does have scripting capabilites built into the Forms plugin, but you have to know JavaScript to use it. Bleah. I always wanted to have an AppleScript plug-in for Acrobat. Here's a first pass at it!
How to Build:
Get the Acrobat SDK from Adobe's website. At press time, this is currently found at http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/acrosdk/download/mac/macr3sdk.hqx
Drop this folder into the "Samples" folder in that SDK and this project should build just fine (I used CodeWarrior 4.1b4).
How to Use:
Put the AppleScript plug-in into the Plug-ins folder under Acrobat (the paid-for, commercial version... since the Reader can't save files, I don't think you can add Annotations to PDF files and save them off).
Click the AppleScript stamper icon in the toolbar.
Stamp wherever you want.
Type in your AppleScript.
Click on the "Fancy" stamp. AppleScript gets run!
Use Cntl key (or second mouse button) to move the stamp. Click while holding the cntl+option keys to edit the script.
To make this plug-in really useful (i.e. if someone really wanted to use this):
Make the addscript dialog movable modal; make it accept drag & drop text; make it handle more than 512 bytes of text (well, that is super easy); take away the Stamper "Fancy" stamp and replace it with a proper Annotation / link appearance rectangle.
Instead of storing AppleScript commands as a string, compiled 'scpt' resources should be stored...
Who owns the code?
Adobe owns Acrobat and the SDK. I hope that since Stamper is part of the SDK, they won't mind me modifying things and publishing this as a hack. If you want to use this for production work and PDF's... well.... uh.... this IS a hack!
