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stejoe91
Participant
February 1, 2020
Question

Expandable part of pdf in Adobe Acrobat DC

  • February 1, 2020
  • 1 reply
  • 5861 views

I have a pdf that should have expandable part. For example:
Some dummy text
line1
line2
line3
Some dummy text 2
If there are more then three lines, "Some dummy text 2" should goes down.
Is this possible in Acrobat DC? 

This topic has been closed for replies.

1 reply

Thom Parker
Community Expert
Thom ParkerCommunity Expert
Community Expert
February 1, 2020

There are no good solutions. You might as well say you want your paper form to have expandable areas.

"Expandable Areas" means re-flowing the page contents to accomodate the expansion. This is not a feature of PDF documents.  It is a feature of LiveCycle PDFs, which aren't really  PDF at all, but rather a dynamic form technology ecapsultated in a PDF shell.  I think they are called something else now, but to create such a document you'll to buy a special tool from Adobe.  These forms are not well supported by 3rd party or mobile PDF viewers 

 

There are a couple of alternatives available for PDF's that you can do in Acrobat Pro. 

1) Page Templates can add a new page to the document. Search for it on this forum. There are many threads on this topic.

2) It's possible to dynamically move, resize, and even create form fields. This is messy and requires a lot of code, but it can be done to mimic dynamic reflow. 

 

Neither of these strategies are well supported by 3rd party and mobile PDF viewers.  

 

Thom Parker - Software Developer at PDFScriptingUse the Acrobat JavaScript Reference early and often
S
stejoe91Author
Participant
February 2, 2020

Thank you for your answer. I use Acrobat DC for creating reports from the application. For static reports, it works great. But impossibility to create dynamic reports should take me back to crystal reports.

Thom Parker
Community Expert
Thom ParkerCommunity Expert
Community Expert
February 3, 2020

I apologize, I assumed you were talking about an interactive form. It's good to have this information up front.

 

Since you are creating reports, rather than distributing an interactive form there are many more possibilities. 

For example, the "Report" object. 

https://help.adobe.com/en_US/acrobat/acrobat_dc_sdk/2015/HTMLHelp/#t=Acro12_MasterBook%2FJS_API_AcroJS%2FReport.htm

 

When I've had a need to create reports I've written an automation script that uses this object in combination with form fields.  You could even use templates and/or  watermarks or overlaying standard report parts, such as logos, headers and footers. Basically you are building a document dynamically from a privileged script, so the dicussions you may have read on form techniques do not apply. 

 

 

Thom Parker - Software Developer at PDFScriptingUse the Acrobat JavaScript Reference early and often
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