How I Solved The Acrobat Popup Dialog/Action Dilemma
Out of frustration I created my own batch processing script that runs outside of the Actions Wizard.
In the last issue I talked about the Acrobat Action Wizard's missing feature that would allow a script to run before the documents are processed, or after the documents are processed, and how, out of frustration I created my own batch processing script that runs outside of the Actions Wizard. I needed to be able to run a script with a popup dialog for gathering information but only have this script appear once, at the beginning of the session. No matter how many ways I tried to accomplish this, through methods I had read about, or methods I came up with on my own, there were always extra easy-to-forget steps for the end user that would cause the action to malfunction if forgotten. The malfunction could be the popup dialog appearing for every PDF processed ("How do I stop this? Only 150 more popups to dismiss."), or not appearing at all.
There had to be a better way. I thought about this a lot. I needed a script that would open the dialog once, but also make sure it opened again the next time the action ran. And I needed to do this seamlessly without user interaction. It finally hit me one day and I'm happy to share it with you. But first I'm going to go through some of the methods I have used and the issues I have with them. I believe this is helpful for learning. Here's my list of methods:
1) The global variable test.
2) The number-of-PDFs field in a dialog.
3) The document creation method.
4) The ZZZ document.
5) My epiphany: The Timer - the method that makes all the others irrelevant.
