Creating a UI panel to fetch and display data in Acrobat Pro

[adhirath_7243]

Hi, I wanted to create a UI panel in acrobat Pro.
I want it to appear when my plugin is loaded and I want to host a react app within the panel. User should be able to select contents within the panel and the panel should be able to interact with the pdf document. How can I go about creating such a thing using acrobat SDK and are there any samples avaialable which I can refer?

[Thom Parker]

Yes, this is possible. Plug-ins are written in C++, but are restricted by the Acrobat environment. However, there is no reason a web brower with sufficient JavaScript support couldn't be displayed by the plug-in. Plug-ins in Windows can also use ActiveX, which could be used for this purpose. 

There are no samples of this type of plug-in, so you need to know what you are doing. 

[adhirath_7243]

How should I go about it then, any suggestion where I could start?

[Thom Parker]

Well, say that you wanted to create a stand alone application that displayed a React application in a browser, do you have an idea of how you'd do it?  I'd start there. 

[adhirath_7243]

I have the react app, I want to understand how to embed it.

[adhirath_7243]

So my current understanding is that I have to use CEF to act as a web browser for my react app, and I will embed CEF into my plugin. My issue now is to get started with creating this. I am able to create a plugin, now I want to be able to create this interaction between CEF and my react app and then finally integrate it all. How should I go about it? 

[Thom Parker]

The questions isn't how to embed the "Chromium Embedded Framework" into a plug-in, but how is CEF embedded into any application? Given the name, I suspect it was specifically designed for his purpose. So, you should be asking, how is it used in a C++ application.  Figure that out and you have solved the plug-in issue. 

This question is outside the scope of this forum, which is about Acrobat issues, and at this point, CEF embedding is a programming issue about a completely different application.  

But Here's a video on using CEF in a windows application. I found it, and a lot of other info, by doing a google search on "Chromium Embedded Framework". 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goAkhSHarWE

[adhirath_7243]

This helped break the process down for me thanks a ton! With that said I would still like to understand how to inject CEF in Acrobat. Like what method//object should I use to actually display the panel. Should it be an AVWindow object? basically I want a similar look to what addins in Word/Excel have and it would be great if I can undock the panel later to resize it. Thanks in advance!

[Thom Parker]

An Acrobat plug-in on windows can access an ActiveX interface. This can be used to display a UI that is outside of Acrobat. so thats one method.  However, there is also no reason that the plug-in itself can't display it's own windows. There isn't any need to use the Acrobat SDK services.  

I think your best approach is to build a stand alone app with C++, that dispalys the CEF. Once you have this working, you should be able to use the same code in a plug-in. 

[adhirath_7243]

Sure thanks, my question was more concerned with once I have CEF embeded in a plugin how do I display it in acrobat? Does that make sense?

[Thom Parker]

The plug-in environment is not well explained, but it's not really that much different from any C++ DLL in Windows.  So, I would think the CEF is displayed in exactly the same way it is in a stand alone application.  The only restrictions preventing the CEF display might be when Acrobat is in Protected mode.