Acrobat Standard vs Acrobat Pro
When Standard falls short, I have workarounds for you.
Full Disclosure
I have never used Acrobat Standard so some of this information might not be completely accurate so feel free to correct me in the comment section below. My knowledge comes from helping Acrobat Standard users find workarounds and successfully answering questions on the Acrobat User Forum that do the same.
Standard's Missing Features
Like Acrobat Pro, Acrobat Standard is a PDF viewer and editor, used by a lot of people to create fillable PDF forms. Features and pricing can be compared here. When questions are posted to the Acrobat Users Forum by Standard users, two things usually happen:
The posters neglect to mention they are using Standard, and not Pro.
Most of the professionals who answer the questions use Pro and always have, so they assume the posters are also using Pro.
Fortunately, the disconnect usually becomes evident pretty quickly during the back-and-forth troubleshooting conversations.
Adobe standardized the user interfaces (UIs) of free Adobe Reader, Acrobat Standard, and Acrobat Pro so they all have the same basic look.
TIP: Save yourself a lot of aggravation and dump the “New” Acrobat or Reader UI).
When attempts to activate tools and other functionality are made, including keystroke shortcuts, with platforms that don't have access to the functionality, an upgrade-to-Acrobat-Pro message appears. Brilliant perpetual marketing - really.
Top Three
The following are the top three Acrobat Pro features that are missing from Acrobat Standard.
UI access to the JavaScript console.
UI access to document level scripts.
The Action Wizard.
If you do any kind of serious work with Acrobat, these features are crucial and well worth the small additional cost of Acrobat Pro over Standard. A lot of users are on work computers and their companies have decided to go with Standard, the less expensive version of Acrobat. The good news is I have workarounds for all three features.
The JavaScript Console
So many answers to questions on the users forum contain "check the console for errors." JavaScript error checking and testing are key functions of the console (also known as the debugger). Notice I said UI access to the console was missing? That's because the console itself is not missing from Standard. What's missing is a user interface way to access it. That goes for Adobe Reader as well. In Standard, if you press Ctrl + j (Windows OS), the keystroke shortcut for opening the console, you will be prompted to upgrade to Pro. There are actually three workarounds for this.
The first workaround is to open the JavaScript category in Edit > Preferences (Crtl + k in Windows) and check the box Show console on errors and messages.
This will not give you control over opening and closing the console, but it will open the console every time a script error is tripped.
Next is a simple script that will open the console:
console.show();How do you run the script to open the console if you can't open the console to run a script in the first place? Simply create a button field on a PDF with a Mouse Up action that runs the script above. You can even save the PDF and open it when you need the console. The script console.clear( ); will clear the console. If you run both scripts together in the button it will always open an empty console:
console.clear(); console.show();This combination is good for testing but not for error checking as the first part of the script will remove the errors.
Create Your Own UI Console Access
Next we have a custom menu item that simply opens the console by executing console.show( ). This is the best of the three because you don't have to open a separate PDF to open the console. In fact, you don't even need to have a PDF open. One of the first downloads I created at www.pdfautomationstation.com was a free menu item to open the console for Reader and Standard users that is still available (free membership signup required). If you want to learn, you can skip the download from my website and build the toolbar button yourself by copying and pasting the following script into a Notepad file, saving it with a .js file extension, and copying the file to the application JavaScripts folder.
/*The following script adds the menu item 'CONSOLE' under Help, which opens the console*/
app.addMenuItem({
cName:"CONSOLE",
cParent:"Help",
cExec:"console.show();",
nPos:0});Document Level Scripts
A lot of answers to questions on the Acrobat Users Forum also contain advice to create a document level script.
These scripts run every time a document is opened so they are ideal for adding functions that can be called from different form field events and other events in the PDF. The function might be 25 lines of code, but can be executed with one simple line of code anywhere in the document. Just like the JavaScript console, it is only UI access that is missing from Standard, not the capability.
Document level scripts can be added by running the addScript document method in the console. You just need a workaround to access the console as previously described.
The Action Wizard
The Action Wizard (previously know as Batch Processing) is an invaluable tool for processing PDFs. You can use the built-in functions, write your own custom scripts, combine the two, and save the actions for future use.
There’s also an Actions Exchange where action files have been uploaded by users. They can be downloaded and used for free. I developed my own Action Wizard, for lack of a better term, to get around some of the limitations of the Action Wizard. This should work with Acrobat Standard.
Again, if you do any serious with Acrobat you should bite the bullet and pay the extra cost instead of messing around with all these workarounds. Anyone suffisticated enough to create his own Action after following my instructions is most likely already using Acrobat Pro, unless of course you're creating solutions for an employer that has only provided the watered down version of Acrobat Pro.