Adobe Acrobat Professional

This configurator drives Adobe Acrobat Professional. It is a processor that offers a number of predefined PDF processing capabilities including merge pages, split pages, basic printing, and conversions to other file formats. In addition it supports executing a custom JavaScript in Acrobat, which allows automating most of the application's functionality from within Switch.

Refer to Version requirements for third-party applications for more information on the third-party application required by this configurator.

Keywords

Keywords can be used with the search function above the elements pane.

The keywords for the Adobe Acrobat Professional configurator are:

PDF
PostScript
EPS
JPEG
TIFF
PNG
split
merge
pages

Detecting the application

This configurator implements the following mechanisms to detect the presence of the corresponding third-party application. See Detecting third-party applications for more information.

Users need to remember to enable JavaScript in the Acrobat Preferences, eg. in Acrobat 9, open the Acrobat preferences, select the section JavaScript, enable the checkboxes "Enable Acrobat JavaScript" and "Enable menu items JavaScript execution privileges".

Detection mechanism	Comments
Automatic detection at startup	Uses information registered with the operating system when the application is installed
Searching from the elements pane	Not provided
Manually locating the executable	Not provided

Connections

This configurator allows only a single outgoing connection.

Properties

Property	Description
Name	The name of the flow element displayed in the canvas
Open	The method used to open the incoming file; i.e. one of the following options: Automatic: opens the incoming file in Acrobat without further instructions; Acrobat supports a number of formats in addition to PDF (refer to the application's documentation) Merge: merges a number of pages into a single PDF file; see the discussion on merging pages below Use script: executes a user-provided Javascript to open the incoming file in a customized manner; see JavaScript for applications for more information
Command	The command to be performed; i.e. one of the following options: None: does nothing (other than what's specified for opening and saving the file) Print: prints the pages of the file; the configurator displays extra properties for selecting the target printer and for configuring basic printing options such as page scaling and rotation Use script: executes a user-provided Javascript on the file for customized processing; see JavaScript for applications for more information
Save as	The method or format to save the file; i.e. one of the following options: File format (including Adobe PDF and several other formats supported by Acrobat): saves the file in the selected file format; for file formats with save options, Acrobat uses the option values that were set during the most recent interactive use of the application (unfortunately Acrobat does not provide an interface to set these option values through scripting); for image file formats also see the discussion on single-page file formats below Split: splits the file into PDF files with individual pages; see the discussion on splitting pages below Use script: executes a user-provided Javascript to save the file in a customized manner; see JavaScript for applications for more information

Merging pages

When the “Merge” open method is selected, the Acrobat configurator expects job folders coming in; individual files are moved to the Problem jobs folder. Each job folder must contain one or more PDF files to be merged into a single document. Files other than PDF are ignored.

The merge order is determined as follows:

If all filenames contain at least two numbers in the format as specified in the job assembler for assembling file sequences, the files will be merged in the order of the lowest number.
Otherwise, if all filenames contain at least one number, the files will be merged in the order of this number.
Otherwise, the files are merged in alphabetical order of filename.

Splitting pages

When the “Split” save method is selected, the Acrobat configurator creates PDF files by splitting the incoming document into sections of one or more pages. The files are named by adding a prefix and/or suffix to the incoming file’s name (the suffix is added before the filename extension).

In the filename prefix and suffix specifications described below, the following character sequences (regardless of case) are replaced by the appropriate number for the file as follows:

Start: the one-based index of the first page contained in this file.
End: the one-based index of the last page contained in this file.
Total: the total number of pages in the original file.

The configurator shows the following extra properties for configuring the page splitting behavior:

Property	Description
Pages per file	The number of pages in each output file (the default is one page per output file)
Filename prefix	The string pattern to be inserted before the filename (the default is the empty string)
Filename suffix	The string pattern to be inserted after the filename (the default is "_start-end_total")
Make Job Folder	If set to yes, all of the output files are stored inside a job folder (even if there is only one output file) and this job folder is injected into the outgoing connection as a single entity If set to no, each file is injected into the outgoing connections as a separate job.

For example, with 2 pages per output file and with the default settings for prefix and suffix, a PDF file named "Brochure.pdf" containing 4 pages will result in 2 files with the following names:

Brochure_1-2_4.pdf
Brochure_3-4_4.pdf

Single-page file formats

When the "save as" property is set to a single-page file format (EPS, JPEG, JPEG2000, TIFF, PNG), Adobe Acrobat generates a distinct output file for each page in the PDF file. In this case, an additional property appears as described in the following table.

Property	Description
Make job folder	If set to yes, all of the output files are stored inside a job folder (even if there is only one output file) and this job folder is injected into the outgoing connection as a single entity If set to no, each file is injected into the outgoing connections as a separate job In both cases, the filenames are under control of Adobe Acrobat

Property

Description

Make job folder

If set to yes, all of the output files are stored inside a job folder (even if there is only one output file) and this job folder is injected into the outgoing connection as a single entity

If set to no, each file is injected into the outgoing connections as a separate job

In both cases, the filenames are under control of Adobe Acrobat

Note:

The above assumes that Adobe Acrobat has been setup to save all pages. For example, Acrobat has a preference that defines which pages should be generated when saving as EPS. By default this is set to a single page; to generate an output file for each page in the PDF file, this should be set to "All". This preference resides at: Acrobat Preferences > Convert From PDF > Encapsulated PostScript -> Edit Settings > General > Page Range.