Beginning JavaScript for Adobe Acrobat

Beginning JavaScript for Adobe Acrobat is a novice's guide to extending your Acrobat forms using JavaScript. The book walks you—step-by-step—through adding useful features to your Acrobat forms and, along the way, it teaches you programming principles and the JavaScript language.

• You’ll learn about arrays while creating an automated price list.
• You’ll use table look-up to create roll-over help.
• You’ll construct regular expressions that let you check a password field for validity.

You will find that JavaScript is very easy, intensely interesting, and will breathe new life into your Acrobat form creation.

Who's this book for?

Beginning JavaScript for Adobe Acrobat is intended for anyone who's had significant experience with Acrobat form design. You don't need to have had programming experience, but you do need to be comfortable making working forms in Acrobat. If you know how to add an Action to an Acrobat Button field or set the font for a Text field, you'll be fine.

By the way, if you are an experienced programmer, this book may be paced too slowly for you; you should go directly to the Adobe Developers' site and read the formal Acrobat JavaScript programmers' guide. Click here.

What Do I Get Out of It?

When you are finished with the book, you will know how to implement a useful collection of JavaScript-based features in your forms. You will also have enough knowledge and experience to use the formal JavaScript documentation to extend your knowledge.

Can I See the Table of Contents?

Sure! Here it is, direct from the book. (This links to a PDF file.)

What's it Cost?

It's cheap: $19.95.

How do I get it?

It's easy. Beginning JavaScript is sold on the honor system.

Download the book (here's a download link) and look it over at your leisure. If you like it (and who wouldn't?) send me $19.95 via Venmo or PayPal to john@acumentraining.com.

If you don't like it, just remove it from your hard disk and we'll say no more about it.

I trust you (and, again, who wouldn't?)

Who Wrote It?

Author John Deubert is a longtime programmer, having developed commercial software for the Macintosh and Windows since the mid-1980s. John's experience with Acrobat JavaScript dates back to 1999, when Acrobat 4 introduced useful support for the language. John has taught classes on PostScript and Acrobat throughout the world since 1985.

John is the author of the past few Acrobat Quickstart Guides, published by Peachpit Press, and wrote the earlier version of this book ("Extending Acrobat Forms with JavaScript") in 2003.

If you're curious or have time on your hands, there's a more extensive biography here.

This is an Acumen Training QEDGuide

Beginning JavaScript for Adobe Acrobat is the first in a series of Acumen Training QEDGuides, electronic books that will cover a variety of technical subjects for the printing, publishing, and design world.

QEDGuides are sized and formatted for reading on-screen with active links as needed to web sites, supplementary documentation, and other external resources.

Because they cover topics of a technical nature, and because many people prefer to read such topics on paper, the page size used by QEDGuides also prints very well. (The guides are actually designed to print exceptionally well two-up on A4 or U.S. Letter-size paper.)

Be sure to watch for the upcoming QEDGuides on creating Acrobat forms and on the PDF file format.