Delete pages in Adobe Acrobat READER

[Little_Princess]

I recently created a PDF file that contains a button for deleting a page:

this.deletePages(this.pageNum, this.pageNum)

This all worked perfectly in my Adobe Acrobat environment but it didn't work for anyone who was using Adobe Reader. I soon found out through the forums here (thanks try67) that the deletePages function only works in Adobe Acrobat OR for spawned pages. 

So my thought process is now, that I simply create a PDF with all fillable fields and then create a template for each page in the PDF:

for (var i = 1; i <= this.numPages; i++)
    this.createTemplate({cName: i, nPage: i});

 Afterwards, I spawn all my templates:

var a = this.templates;
for (i = 0; i < a.length; i++)
    a[i].spawn(this.numPages, false, false);

Now I'd have x amount of original pages and x amount of spawned/duplicated pages. I then delete the original pages in Acrobat Pro and save the document with only the spawned pages. Like this, the spawned pages should be deletable in Adobe Reader, but it looks like they are not.

So, my questions are:

- Is this the correct procedure or is there maybe an easier one? If it is the correct procedure, what am I doing wrong?

- Is there a way to install Adobe Acrobat Reader in parallel to Acrobat Pro? Because it is super annoying to have to get 2 devices and install one software on the first device and the other software on the second device and then send the documents back and forth between the devices only to test the functionality in Adobe Acrobat Reader. This can't be the only solution, right? I mean, I'm a paying customer for Adobe Acrobat and yet I have no chance of testing my document for the end user.

[Bernd Alheit]

Acrobat Reader can delete spawned pages when the pages where spawned in Acrobat Reader. 

[Little_Princess]

Thanks Bernd, I didn't know what. Is there any way that I can figure out which page is an original one an which page is a spawned one? I assume Acrobat creates some internal tag/flag in the source code of a spawned page. Can I somehow see that. I'd be intersted in seeing the flag, even if that means that I have to dig beyond the GUI of Adobe Acrobat.

[try67]

No, there isn't such a flag. The only way you can identify a spawned page is if it has form fields that were renamed automatically from those on the original Template page, as their names will have a specific pattern that can be identified.

[Thom Parker]

All you have to do is hide the template on the "Templates" dialog and you're good.  Hide it before spawning. 

[Little_Princess]

The template hiding did the trick. @Bernd Alheit I tested it with spawning the pages from within Adobe Acrobat Pro and it still worked. So, everything is fine now. Thanks to everybody here who took their time to look into this!

[Thom Parker · Accepted solution]

So you deleted the original page templates?  That's a no-no.  Page templates must be hidden. That's how they work. You delete them and the spawned pages are no longer spawned, but regular pages. 

But why are the pages spawned upfront?  This is normally a forward only process.  A button is added to the form to allow the user spawn a new page when one is needed. 

[Little_Princess]

Re "why are the pages spawned upfront?". I just have a document in which the user should see all the pages and possibilities upfront and then they can delete a page if not needed.

I'm currently doing a bit more testing, but it looks like this did the trick! In case anyone else ever needs to do this procedure, I also had an error in mine code in the question. When creating the templates, the code should be modified to this, since the numPages and nPage are 0-based:

for (var i = 0; i < this.numPages; i++) {
	name = i.toString();
	while (name.length < 3) name = "0" + name;
	// cName = template name | nPage = 0-based index of page within document
	this.createTemplate({cName: name, nPage: i});
}

 I also added a line which adds leading zeros to the template name, just in case you have more than 9 pages, as the templates aren't sorted by the order they are created but rather by their string value. And then the sorting would look like 0, 1, 10, 11, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 which creates a wrong order when spawning the pages later.